The archive.

Liberty belongs on the revolutionary Left, not with conservatism—this is the wager that organizes Rothbard's sweeping reconstruction of the political spectrum. Classical liberalism, he argues, was originally radical, anti-feudal, and internationalist, the force that overthrew the Old Order of caste, theocracy, and militarism; it decayed only when natural rights gave way to utilitarian compromise. Socialism enters as a confused heir, chasing liberal ends through the conservative means of state power. Following Gabriel Kolko, Rothbard reads American Progressivism and the New Deal not as socialist ruptures but as state monopoly capitalism, in which business secured through regulation the privilege it could not win in competition. Mid-century libertarians erred by mistaking conservatives for allies; the corrective, he insists, is a movement that recovers its antiwar, anti-privilege inheritance and trades short-run despair for long-run confidence.

It was, and still is, middle-of-the-road because it tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative means.

Could the New Left’s demand for participatory democracy lead toward free markets rather than centralized planning? In this 1965 essay, Murray N. Rothbard finds potential allies among civil rights organizers, antiwar students, and rebels against bureaucratic universities. His interest lies in what they do: organize Freedom Schools, resist conscription, and build institutions outside established channels of authority. Against both the Old Left’s reliance on government and the Right’s support for militarism, he reads these experiments as forms of libertarian resistance. Yet his sympathy is also an attempt at persuasion: the market society he proposes is his destination, not an agreed New Left objective. The essay exposes both the practical grounds for cooperation and the unresolved economic disagreements within this proposed alliance.

With De Gaulle challenging the dollar, Rueff calling for a return to gold at double its price, and sterling under siege in 1964, Haberler enters the Bretton Woods debate to attack two opposite errors: treating gold as monetary discipline and treating reserve creation as a substitute for adjustment. Money, he insists, is machinery for coordinating exchange, not a sacred parity; international arrangements earn their keep by preserving trade, convertibility, and price stability. The heart of the argument shifts the quarrel from liquidity to adjustment, showing how downward wage rigidity gives fixed exchange rates an inflationary bias and how the adjustable peg invites one-way speculation. His prescription is limited exchange-rate flexibility and conditional, ad hoc cooperation rather than automatic reserve creation.

As the 1963 BIS report remarked, liquidity must not only be sufficient but must also be capable of running out, because the ultimate sanction, a liquidity crisis, may be needed to bring governments to their senses.

When anticapitalism gave up Marx's prophecy of ever-deepening proletarian misery, it fell back on a newer charge: that free competition inevitably breeds cartels that fleece the masses. Mises answers by prising monopoly apart from monopoly price, since mere exclusivity, whether a patent or a unique resource, yields no profit unless demand permits it, and then locating the real source of durable monopoly pricing in state action, in the tariffs that wall off national markets, the subsidies, and the enforced production quotas. His central exhibit is American farm policy, a public cartel for food and cotton that still founders on the question of quotas, while antitrust law becomes a covert substitute for general price control. The international coffee agreement, he argues, is conspiracy renamed diplomacy once governments assign the shares.

Die angeblich unaufhaltsame Tendenz zur Verdrängung der Wettbewerbspreise des freien Marktes durch Monopolpreise gibt es nicht.

English translation: “The supposedly irresistible tendency for monopoly prices to supplant the competitive prices of the free market does not exist.”

An operating policy can remain optimal despite errors in its coefficients while its returns—and the ranking of alternative policies—change. J. K. Sengupta, C. Millham, and Gerhard Tintner make this distinction central to their study of stochastic linear programming. Their numerical example preserves the winning selection under ten-percent coefficient errors yet allows inferior selections to exchange places, giving concrete force to the question of what, exactly, is stable. They then compare the variability of best, second-best, and third-best returns, exploring a conditional trade-off between higher returns and lower dispersion through an Iowa farm example. The article offers readers a precise way to distinguish persistence of an optimal policy from stability of its payoff, while its variance argument requires closer scrutiny of the assumptions supporting that trade-off.

More exact calculation need not make economic decisions less personal—or markets less subject to private power. In this 1965 article, Hans Bayer examines how electronic data processing enables firms not merely to adapt to competition but to shape its conditions. His distinctive concern is organizational: better coordination can extend the manageable size of enterprises, while the costs of computing and specialist personnel favor firms already large enough to afford them. Yet Bayer also sees shared optimization as an opportunity for smaller businesses. Cooperation among them, he argues, may preserve economic freedom more effectively than isolated rivalry. The article offers a concrete account of how computational capacity can redistribute economic agency, without mistaking improved forecasts for certainty or calculated alternatives for decisions that no longer require judgment.

Two words—adjustment and financing—have been used in so many senses that the confusion hides genuine disagreement over what governments facing a payments imbalance should actually do. Machlup imposes order by carving out a third category. Real adjustment is narrowed to the classical mechanism of relative costs, prices, incomes, and resource allocation; financing is confined to short-term funds that tide over an imbalance; and between them sits what he names compensatory corrections—measures such as tariffs, subsidies, and lasting capital-flow shifts that reduce the need for adjustment without being either. The taxonomy carries a policy sting: because real adjustment is painful and financing a mere stopgap, authorities reach for corrective measures that so often fail through retaliation, offsetting trade effects, and induced import demand.

Rationing a scarce supply of foreign exchange under direct controls does not reduce the demand, but merely leaves part of it unsatisfied.

Strip away the civic pieties and the State stands revealed, in this 1965 essay, as something other than society organized for the common good. Rothbard opposes the comfortable equation of government with "we the people," insisting that taxation, conscription, and imprisonment are impositions by one organized group upon another. Borrowing Franz Oppenheimer's distinction between the "economic means" of production and exchange and the "political means" of seizure, he casts the State as the institutionalized political means—born of conquest and tribute, not social contract. Because rulers are always a minority, they enlist intellectuals to manufacture legitimacy; because constitutions are interpreted by the very power they would bind, limits become licenses. War, feared alongside revolution, is the great engine of expansion. History itself becomes a race between social power and State power, cooperation against predation.

It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale.

For Hayek, the Austrian school’s achievement was not simply discovering marginal utility, but explaining value through the choices people make among competing uses of scarce resources. This 2013 collection chapter, incorporating revised encyclopedia material, asks why that insight proved transformative—and why its success could make a distinct school disappear. Writing as both historian and participant, Hayek presents Menger’s legacy as a shared approach rather than a fixed doctrine: Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser developed it in markedly different directions. Readers can discover why subjective valuation is not yet an explanation of prices, and how intellectual disagreement helped shape a tradition whose principles, Hayek argues, became part of general economic theory.

A school has its greatest success when it ceases as such to exist because its leading ideals have become a part of the general dominant teaching.

Recall the old "cloakroom theory" of banking, in which a bank merely stores money and hands it back like a coat checked at the door—a fiction long since exploded for commercial banks, which plainly manufacture deposits by lending. Machlup's essay asks why the same superstition still binds international institutions, keeping the IMF a warehouse of member currencies rather than a creator of reserve money. He recounts how the United States rejected Keynes's Clearing Union at Bretton Woods for fear that international money creation would siphon real resources from creditor nations to overspenders, then presses the question reserve creation cannot escape: whoever spends newly created money first commands real goods at others' expense. Costless reserve deposits, unlike gold mined at great cost, could hand that saving to developing countries—if the world will decide who ought to benefit.

In the opinion of an increasing number of experts, the required reform or necessary evolution will take the form of extending the functions of the IMF and, especially, of allowing its liabilities to become reserve assets for national monetary authorities.

Three days after de Gaulle's February 1965 press conference demanded that international payments rest once more on gold, Fred Hirsch put the objections to Jacques Rueff, and this Princeton interview records the exchange. Rueff denies being the General's scriptwriter but presses his long-standing argument that the gold-exchange standard is structurally absurd: dollars paid to creditor central banks flow straight back to New York, so the United States never feels its deficit and no corrective discipline bites. He defends a one-time rise in the gold price—modeled on Roosevelt's 1934 revaluation—not as an end but as the means to liquidate accumulated dollar balances without deflation, while Hirsch challenges him on arbitrariness, gold supply, international credit institutions, the CRU proposal, and British policy.

And the main consequence is that there is no reason whatever for the deficit to disappear, because it does not appear.

Rothbard's method here is selective inheritance: keep Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker's stateless politics, discard their economics. He honors the pair for carrying individualist anarchism from anti-state protest into a positive model of voluntary society—Spooner's likening of taxation to a highwayman's threat crystallizes the shared premise—yet parts from them on two political points and one economic core. Ad hoc jury-made law, he insists, must yield to an objective libertarian legal code; occupancy-and-use land tenure must yield to Lockean acquisition and free transfer. The heart of the critique is monetary: their mutualism, inheriting the labor theory of value, wrongly treats rent, interest, and profit as exploitation. Drawing on time preference, Rothbard argues that interest would persist even in barter, and that genuine free banking would yield harder money rather than endless credit.

The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: “Your money or your life.”