The archive.

Ninety days of frozen wages and prices gave Nixon's New Economic Policy of August 1971 its drama, but Haberler asks the harder question of what happens once the freeze is lifted. A freeze, he warns, suspends visible price changes without touching demand, wage bargaining, or credibility; hold it too long and it breeds evasion, bureaucracy, and corruption. The essay's hinge is a distinction between two incomes policies: guideposts and controls that substitute official judgment for the market, and reforms that restore competition by curbing union privileges, revising Davis-Bacon and minimum-wage rules, ending strike subsidies, and opening the door to imports. Sustained inflation, he holds, is always monetary, yet monopoly unions can still force authorities to choose between validating wage push and accepting unemployment. Business monopoly, by contrast, produces mostly one-shot effects and matters far less to a continuing spiral.

Industrial monopolies or oligopolies are not much of a problem as far as inflation is concerned.

Oskar Lange had been Mises's most formidable socialist antagonist; his final, posthumous treatise, Rothbard argues, quietly retreated toward the praxeology it once opposed. Reading Lange's late Political Economy, Rothbard tracks the concessions: that monetary calculation and profit-seeking made rational conduct explicit, that economic laws can be deduced from broad axioms of rational action, that Austrian utility theory is ordinal preference rather than hedonistic psychology. Each admission carries a threat Lange cannot face—if economics simply is praxeology, Marxism forfeits its claim to be the foundational science of historical economic forms. So Lange widens praxeology to swallow cybernetics, programming, and input-output analysis, grafting institutional categories onto the logic of choice. Rothbard reads the maneuver as evasion, and draws the larger point: the calculation debate was always also a contest over the foundations of economics.

In this way, Lange accepts the essential deductive Misesian methodology for economic theory: beginning with broadly general praxeological principles as axioms and from these elaborating necessary laws by logical deduction.

Lachmann casts Mises as the economist who decisively rejected equilibrium as the master concept of economics and put the market process in its place. Contemporary neoclassical theory he indicts as 'late classical formalism,' mathematically elegant yet mute on real problems like permanent inflation, because it abstracts from choice, alternatives, and uncertainty. The newer models of steady growth—Cassel, Harrod, Domar, Solow—fare no better, since continuous coordination would demand perfect foresight and the instantaneous rearrangement of heterogeneous capital. Because knowledge is unevenly held and interpreted, expectations diverge and plans must fail. What survives is individual equilibrium, never the system-wide kind; the market is millions of people seeking their own equilibria within an order that never reaches a general one.

But in doing so they have taken the shadow of the formal apparatus for the substance of the real subject matter.

Borrowing Thomas Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions while refusing its relativism, this essay diagnoses modern economics as a discipline capable of forgetting its own discoveries. Lacking laboratory tests and saturated with ideology, it entrenched a false paradigm through mathematics, positivist testing, and professional prestige — burying the Austrian School in the process. Rothbard reads the eclipse of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Mises not as refutation but as collective amnesia, sharpened by late translations and Mises's denial of a prestigious American post. Yet criticism alone topples no paradigm; it must be replaced. Mises supplies the replacement through praxeology, the deductive science of human action, from which follow the critique of cumulative interventionism, commodity money as a check on inflationary credit, and the calculation argument that an economy without private ownership has no real prices to reason with.

But the work of Ludwig von Mises furnishes that “something”; it furnishes an economics grounded not on the aping of physical science, but on the very nature of man and of individual choice.

Can a market-oriented reform make government more powerful rather than less? In this essay, first published in 1971 and reprinted here in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard turns that question against Milton Friedman’s reputation as a champion of economic liberty. Tax withholding, guaranteed income, and a fixed monetary-growth rule become tests of the difference between limiting coercion and improving its administration. Writing from an Austrian and libertarian perspective, Rothbard argues that freedom in individual markets cannot be insulated from state control over taxation and money. His polemic exposes a fault line within free-market thought: whether predictable rules and competitive provision suffice, or whether compulsory financing and monetary monopoly compromise the project itself. Readers can discover why proposals defended as market-friendly attract resistance from within the libertarian camp.

A child can acquire a parent’s skills without inheriting them genetically—or understanding how they work. This distinction anchors Hayek’s 1971 review of C. D. Darlington’s The Evolution of Man and Society. Welcoming Darlington’s attention to innate differences, Hayek challenges his tendency to equate unconscious conduct with genetic determination. Imitation and upbringing, he argues, transmit practical knowledge that neither teacher nor learner can necessarily articulate. The review offers a precise way to question claims about inherited abilities: what evidence distinguishes biological descent from the cultural transmission accompanying it? Hayek’s alternative also carries a warning. Skills accumulated across generations can disappear when the practices sustaining them are broken, making cultural achievement more vulnerable than genetic endowment.

But we must not confuse the inherited capacity to learn a great variety of modes of conduct with an heredity of particular modes of conduct.

Everyday life depends on knowing enough to proceed—not on understanding everything we encounter. In this essay, Alfred Schütz examines what makes familiar routines break down into problems, and what allows inquiry to stop. His distinctive approach connects phenomenological accounts of attention and experience with the socially inherited knowledge embodied in language, tools, customs, and practical recipes. What matters in a situation, he argues, depends on an actor’s projects and biography; even the types through which we recognize objects and people bear traces of earlier problems. Readers can discover why familiarity is uneven, why the same situation calls for different interpretations, and how communication relies on overlapping structures of relevance rather than identical knowledge.

When Washington stopped buying and selling gold in August 1971, the official thirty-five dollars an ounce ceased to be a price and became a mere bookkeeping entry — and most of the ensuing debate, Machlup contends, mistook that accounting figure for an operative economic force. Devaluing the dollar in gold would change nothing real: trade, employment, and competitiveness turn on exchange rates set in the market, not on how governments label their gold stocks. He dismisses the talk of burden sharing as claptrap, separates genuine transfer burdens from the mercantilist pseudo-burden of forgone reserves, and warns that raising gold's book value would keep alive the illusion of restored gold convertibility. What matters instead is purchasing power: no asset serves as a reserve unless its holder knows what he can get for it.

Where there are no sales, no purchases, and no exchanges of gold against dollars, there can be neither a price nor an exchange value of gold in dollars.

Aid to poor countries is laudable; producing it by attaching international reserve creation to development finance is not. That is the disciplined case Haberler mounts against the "Link" between IMF special drawing rights and assistance to less developed countries. Reserve allocation answers to payments, trade variability, and liquidity, he argues, while aid answers to income, wealth, and welfare; fusing the two would rationalize neither and turn every SDR decision into a distributive struggle. The Link is inherently inflationary, since reserves allocated for development are designed to be spent, and even the subtler non-inflationary version proposed by Karlik and Scitovsky would yield little. Aid should instead be voted openly through the budget, its burden made explicit rather than scattered by IMF quotas and balance-of-payments accidents - a tax lottery in place of a tax system.

This argument again mixes reserves and aid.

Two charges anchor the socialist case against capitalism: that it produces too little and distributes what it makes unjustly. Answering both, Hazlitt insists that nominal-dollar comparisons mislead, deflating U.S. output from 1939 to 1969 to show real income climbing across every quintile, with electricity, plumbing, automobiles and telephones passing from luxuries into ordinary working-class possessions. Against the exploitation thesis he shows payrolls dwarfing after-tax profits and argues that wages and profits rise and fall together rather than warring over a fixed fund. His sharpest move is linguistic: the very phrase 'distribution of income' falsely implies that goods are first produced and then parceled out, when in a market they are owned throughout continuous production and exchange. The cure for poverty, he concludes, is greater earning power, not redistribution.

When profits are large, it does not mean that they are at the expense of the workers. The opposite is more likely to be true.

The claim that Black Americans had been shut out of postwar prosperity is met here with income statistics arguing the reverse. Measured in constant dollars, Hazlitt shows, median Black family income rose sharply between 1949 and 1969 while the share of families under $3,000 fell steeply—gains at least fully proportional to those of white families. He concedes the persistent relative gap, Black median income climbing only from 51 to 63 percent of white, and warns against treating either group as homogeneous across region, age, and class. Rising Black teenage unemployment he blames chiefly on minimum-wage laws that price the low-skilled out of jobs, holding the free market, not regulation, to be the strongest counterforce to discrimination. The engine of advance, he concludes in this 1971 essay, is integration into an expanding capitalist economy, not a separate "black economy."

What chiefly counts is the productivity of the whole economy; what counts is the maximization of the incentives to that productivity.

A young governess at a country house, forbidden ever to appeal to her absent employer, resolves to master the good and evil around her by her own will, and this, in Voegelin's reading of Henry James's novella, is the drama of a demonically closed soul. Employer, governess, and housekeeper stand for God, soul, and earthly common sense; the intercepted letters and the apparitions of Quint mark a theology of non-communication in which salvation becomes self-salvation without grace. The title names not heroic discipline but the escalation of willful virtue into destruction, a 'Black Salvation' that kills the boy it means to save. A 1970 postscript, printed with the 1947 letter, refuses to translate James's symbols into philosophy and instead reads Bly as one more modern Eden, a genteel English garden of closed existence.

Henry James could be fascinated by Edenic existence, but he knew that it was the hell of living death.