The archive.

Strip a share of its metaphysics and nothing intrinsic remains—only a valuation sustained transaction by transaction. From that deflationary premise Granger and Morgenstern mount an empirical assault on market folklore, insisting first that 'prediction' be defined before it is tested. Deploying spectral analysis across daily, weekly, and monthly series, they find price changes broadly following a random walk—not because the future is unknowable, but because past prices yield no usable linear forecast. The book's discipline lies in its distinctions: absolute price versus relative movement, direction versus magnitude. Volume, they show, says nothing about whether a stock will rise or fall, yet tracks the size of its swings. Optimal-allocation claims, seasonal cycles, and profitable filter rules fall in turn.

The value of a stock is only what someone else will pay for it — in cash, in another stock or whatever it may be.

A privately owned railroad cannot enrich its owner unless it carries the public and their goods, and that homely fact carries Hazlitt's thesis that property used in market production already serves a public purpose more faithfully than state ownership. Grounding the argument in Adam Smith and illustrating it with Henry Ford's reinvested profits, he shows that income saved and put to work in tractors, furnaces and housing benefits society as fully as any nationalization. From property he turns to saving, mounting a sustained attack on Keynes's 'cake' analogy: saving is not permanent nonconsumption but the precondition of capital formation, and a world where thrift was sin would grow steadily poorer. His austere conclusion is that the rich do most good not through extravagance or expropriation but by living simply and investing productively.

What the advocates of all expropriation schemes fail to realize is that property in private hands used for the production of goods and services for the market is already for all practical purposes public wealth.

A development plan that promises higher average income need not offer greater security against disappointing results. Gerhard Tintner and N. S. Raghavan make this tension explicit by introducing uncertain productive returns into the Mahalanobis two-sector planning model for India. Rather than calculate a single income target, they estimate distributions of terminal national income and compare how investment allocations alter expected performance, low-income thresholds, and relative variability. Their tested policies show why these measures cannot be treated as interchangeable: an allocation preferred for its average return may lose its appeal when stability becomes the priority. The article offers a concrete encounter with planning as a choice among risk criteria, while openly acknowledging the limitations of its aggregated model, independence assumption, and rough numerical approximations.

"It is high time," Rothbard announces, that someone blew the whistle on Women's Liberation. His 1970 polemic answers Betty Friedan and NOW with Austrian economics rather than sympathy: women's lower average wages, he contends, reflect interrupted careers, childrearing, turnover costs, and marginal productivity, not irrational discrimination—which a competitive market would punish anyway, since a biased employer forfeits profit and labor to rivals. He dismisses the feminist "brainwashing" thesis as unfalsifiable, recasts domesticity as a freely chosen division of labor, and reinterprets marriage as a contract binding men to support women and children. Turning from Friedanite liberalism to the anti-family "New Feminism" of Valerie Solanis and Robin Morgan, he treats objections to women as "sex objects" as an assault on heterosexual attraction itself. The result is a combative fusion of libertarian theory and cultural backlash.

Woman as “sex objects”? Of course they are sex objects and, praise the Lord, they always will be.

How can an econometric model guide policy when the statistics needed to build it are missing? Gerhard Tintner, Isabella Consigliere, and José T. M. Carneiro confront this problem in their 1970 article, published in parallel Portuguese and English texts. Using Brazilian data for 1952–1964, they construct a compact Keynesian system to estimate how spending, wages, and population affect output, consumption, prices, and employment together. The revealing tension lies between policy ambition and restrictive assumptions: without capital-stock data, production depends on labor alone, and higher wages yield declines in real output and employment that the authors themselves question. Readers can trace both the appeal of simultaneous policy responses and the dependence of those responses on proxy data, theoretical choices, and what the model leaves out.

Record American deficits piled up through the late 1960s, yet confidence in the dollar held—a puzzle Haberler and Willett resolve by arguing that the world had drifted onto a de facto dollar standard in which the currency was inconvertible into gold for large official sums, and that the very gap between the gold stock and dollar liabilities made mass conversion unthinkable. From this they draw the case for what they call benign neglect: because the United States cannot unilaterally devalue a currency everyone else pegs to, it should pursue domestic stability and curb inflation while leaving adjustment to surplus countries, which may accumulate dollars, appreciate, expand, or lower trade barriers. Written just before the August 1971 suspension of convertibility, the essay presses for modest exchange-rate flexibility—crawling pegs, wider bands, floating—over the distortions of capital and trade controls.

whenever a serious dilemma or conflict between the requirements of external and internal equilibrium arises, domestic policy objectives should take precedence over balance-of-payments considerations

Can a predictable monetary rule prevent instability if credit expansion itself distorts investment? In this essay, Hans Sennholz welcomes Milton Friedman’s challenge to Keynesian economics, but argues that monetarism retains key premises of the approach it challenges: reliance on economic aggregates and government monetary management. Against Friedman’s proposed steady growth of the money supply, Sennholz argues that even modest expansion can depress interest rates below levels warranted by saving and encourage unsustainable investments. The contrast brings a concrete disagreement into focus: stable prices need not mean coordinated production. Readers can discover why an Austrian defence of markets may reject monetarist policy, and how Sennholz’s case for gold and freedom of monetary contract shifts the debate from choosing better management rules to questioning monetary authority itself.

Before poverty can be relieved it must be defined, and this 1971 essay argues that loose, relative definitions turn a real but bounded problem into an endlessly expanding political claim. To call the bottom fifth or third 'poor' confuses inequality with poverty and guarantees the problem can never be solved, since some group is always comparatively worse off. Hazlitt dissects the Johnson-era war on poverty's shifting thresholds, leaning on Rose D. Friedman's recalculation that, adjusting for family size and food-spending patterns, roughly halved the official poverty rate. Applied backward to 1929 or outward to India, today's American thresholds redescribe historic abundance as mass want. Poverty, he concludes, should be pegged to subsistence sufficient for health and strength, not to median income, lest relief outrun what work can earn and dependency become rational.

It is obvious, however, that all merely relative definitions of poverty make the problem insoluble.

Education, in Rothbard's account, is the whole lifelong forming of a person's reason, values, and knowledge, and schooling only a narrow slice of it — one that compulsion perverts into an instrument of rule. Because children differ radically in ability, pace, and temperament, he holds that individualized parental or tutorial instruction outperforms the classroom, which must impose a single curriculum on unlike minds. The historical chapters trace mandatory schooling from Luther and Calvin, who wielded it to enforce religious uniformity, to Prussia, where a militarized bureaucracy standardized language and manufactured obedient subjects. America, in his telling, is only a softer republican version of the same transfer of authority from family to state — a compulsory public press for the child's mind, breeding dependence where it claims to build citizens.

The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child?

Growth and development economics, for all its bulk, conceals a yawning gap: it has mislaid the entrepreneur. Kirzner sets out to recover him, distinguishing the routine economizing that allocates given means to given ends from the entrepreneurial element proper, alertness to opportunities, ends, and means not yet noticed. Against Schumpeter, whose innovator disrupts a placid circular flow, he casts the entrepreneur as an equilibrating force, one who perceives the gaps between input costs and output values that only disequilibrium and imperfect knowledge create. Development, on this reading, is not an external shock but the discovery and seizing of profit opportunities already waiting; the market's distinctive virtue is that its profit signals prompt that discovery, where nonmarket systems supply no equivalent mechanism.

The theory of the market explores the extent to which economizing decisions of many independent market participants can be carried out simultaneously.

Sincere reformers and demagogues alike have reached for the same lever—state action—to abolish poverty, and in Hazlitt's telling they have mostly made it worse. This 1971 Freeman polemic dismantles a catalogue of political remedies: redistribution and the guaranteed income, union privilege and featherbedding, minimum-wage laws, welfare finance, price and wage controls, and finally socialism itself. His method is to look past the visible transfer to the hidden cost—who pays, whose incentives collapse, what output is never produced. A statutory wage floor, he insists, cannot conjure the productivity it names; it only prices the least-skilled out of work. Socialism's deeper failure is the calculation problem: without genuine prices for capital goods, planners cannot rank alternatives except by imitating the market they reject. Durable relief, he concludes, rests on productivity, not command.

We cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him less.

Freedom, inequality, and the division of labor are not separable social accidents but mutually supporting conditions of civilization, so runs the thesis of an essay first delivered to a 1970 symposium and reissued in 1991 with a combative new introduction. Because each person is a unique, non-interchangeable individual, Rothbard argues, liberty is the precondition of human development; and only a developed division of labor, rooted in the natural diversity Mises made central, gives individuality the scope to flourish. Egalitarianism, Marxist, Romantic, primitivist, he treats as a single anti-differentiating impulse, from Marx's fantasy of hunting, fishing, and criticizing at will to the lookism and quotas of what the new introduction calls political correctness. Equality taken literally means sameness; against it he defends the older liberal equality of liberty, and natural aristocracies that rise through voluntary excellence rather than force.

He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.