The archive.

Fusionism, the conservative synthesis that promised to reconcile traditionalist moral order with libertarian freedom, is dismantled here as a myth that cannot stand as a philosophy in its own right. Reading Frank S. Meyer's arguments closely, Rothbard finds that on every decisive issue the mediation dissolves into libertarianism. Virtue cannot be coerced, since a compelled act is mere motion, not moral choice; community holds no rights above the persons who compose it; order arises from voluntary interaction, not state command. Meyer's real quarrel, Rothbard argues, is with utilitarian liberalism and the Chicago law-and-economics that swaps justice for efficiency — not with a rights-based libertarianism grounded in natural law. Only his appeal to tradition, which cannot judge itself without some standard beyond it, marks a true inconsistency. Fusionism emerges as a Sorelian coalition myth, not a coherent third way.

Unless he can choose his worst, he cannot choose his best.

A single word—“despite”—is the target of Hayek’s brief letter to The Times, republished here in 2022. A headline treats deepening recession as surprising when inflation is falling; Hayek counters with an analogy to worsening withdrawal symptoms as drug intake declines. His comparison suggests that reducing inflation may bring immediate distress rather than immediate recovery. The letter offers no evidence or developed economic explanation, but its compressed challenge makes visible the causal expectation hidden in a newspaper headline: removing a harmful influence and escaping the costs of adjustment need not happen together.

Knowing how to produce something does not establish whether producing it is worth the resources consumed. In this introduction to the 1981 special issue An Economic Critique of Socialism, Don Lavoie makes that distinction the starting point for a question about how economic knowledge is generated. His reading of Mises and Hayek shifts attention from prices as numbers available to planners to competition as the process that makes prices informative. On this account, instructing socialist managers to imitate competitive outcomes leaves the central problem unresolved. The short essay offers a pointed orientation to the calculation debate and explains why Lavoie regards it as a challenge not only to comprehensive planning but also to economists who claim to know how market prices should be corrected.

Forty years after Schumpeter predicted that capitalism would perish of its own success, Haberler measures the prophecy against the postwar record. Schumpeter, he stresses, was no socialist: his forecast was diagnostic, resting on the claim that capitalism's economic triumphs corrode the cultural and political institutions that shelter it, from aristocratic leadership and the family firm to a bourgeois order steadily undermined by a rising class of resentful intellectuals. Haberler preserves that insight while pressing three corrections. Schumpeter oversold monopoly, much of which lives on state protection rather than creative destruction; his case for socialism's efficiency belonged to the 'logic of blueprints,' which paired comparisons of West and East Germany or Taiwan and China have since demolished; and his gloom about capitalist resilience underrated the growth the postwar decades delivered. The question, Haberler concludes, is how far public planning can go within democratic limits.

“Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think so.”

Hayek remembers encountering Mises’s critique of socialism not as confirmation of settled beliefs, but as a blow to his own hopes for a more rational and just society. This foreword to Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism, published in 1981 and reprinted here in 2013, combines that personal reckoning with a precise clarification: economic calculation concerns how production is coordinated, not merely how managers are held accountable. Its distinctive tension lies in Hayek’s allegiance to Mises’s achievement alongside his resistance to Mises’s rationalist account of social cooperation. Readers can discover how Hayek separates understanding an institution’s benefits from deliberately creating it—and how intellectual gratitude can coexist with substantial philosophical disagreement.

Socialism promised to fulfil our hopes for a more rational, more just world. And then came this book. Our hopes were dashed.

Does aid to a government necessarily help the people it governs? In this newspaper opinion article, first published in 1981 and republished here in 2022, Hayek challenges the Brandt Report’s case for large-scale transfers to poorer countries. He supports capital flows but argues that government-directed assistance can prolong policies that obstruct growth. His distinctive alternative separates political from commercial risk: public guarantees would protect private foreign investment against specified government interference, while investors would remain responsible for economic losses. The article offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s development politics, including his sharply asserted contrast between market-oriented and socialist economies. Its most concrete contribution is a proposal that makes the allocation of risk, rather than the volume of aid alone, central to the dispute.

Can a tax leave market choices undistorted when payment itself is compulsory? In this article, first published in 1981 and reprinted in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard challenges the search for neutral taxation at its foundation. His benchmark is voluntary exchange: a purchase demonstrates an expected benefit, whereas a tax payment, he argues, demonstrates no comparable consent. This distinction puts him at odds not only with defenders of government provision but also with free-market economists seeking less distorting taxes. His discussion of public goods and equal head taxes makes the stakes concrete, especially where colonial monetary taxes forced subsistence producers into wage employment. The essay offers a sharply defined encounter with the difference between improving a tax’s economic effects and justifying compulsory payment at all.

Were American banking crises failures of monetary freedom, or consequences of privileges that insulated banks from their contractual obligations? In this historical report chapter, republished as Part 1 of the 2002 collection, Murray N. Rothbard argues for the latter. His libertarian perspective directs attention to concrete arrangements: permission to suspend specie payments, banknotes secured by government debt, and reserves concentrated through correspondent banks. Against these he sets the Suffolk Bank’s private clearing system, whose redemption discipline offers a contrasting model. Rothbard also challenges familiar political divisions, identifying wealthy merchants and railroad promoters among inflation’s beneficiaries. Readers encounter an interpretation that makes the enforcement of banking promises—not simply the presence or absence of a central bank—the decisive test of monetary freedom.

Can an economist oppose interference with private exchange while treating taxation as something fundamentally different? In this short formal comment on Don Lavoie, Murray N. Rothbard accepts corrections to his classification of intervention, then presses its implications beyond conventional free-market policy. He argues that consistent opposition to coerced transfers reaches government expenditure as well as taxation. Yet noninterference alone cannot define legitimate exchange: his example of a stolen horse shows why protecting a transaction may protect theft rather than ownership. The distinctive interest of this response lies in its movement from technical distinctions to uncomfortable normative commitments. Readers can see how Rothbard connects fiscal analysis to opposition to government, and why he holds that market advocacy requires a theory of just property titles rather than economics alone.

Keynes was, at bottom, an inflationist, and this compact essay works to convert that charge from insult into mechanism. Keynesian stimulus, Hazlitt argues, cannot rest on spending financed by taxation, since taxes cancel the purchasing power the spending was meant to add; what matters is the deficit. Once government spends beyond its revenue, the gap must be closed either by borrowing, which merely postpones contraction, or by creating new money, which means inflation. Every downturn thus becomes an argument for another dose of the same expedient, making Keynesianism less a theory of demand than a political technology for normalizing permanent fiscal imbalance. Reaching back to Roman debasement and John Law's paper schemes, Hazlitt warns that no inflation on record produced sound expansion, only depreciation, arbitrary redistribution and economic demoralization.

The lessons of inflation are soon forgotten.

Divisions of knowledge are neither timeless truths nor mere administrative convenience: they are historical settlements, shaped by intellectual expansion, cultural purpose, and institutional power. Tracing the ordering of learning from Aristotle's theoretical-practical-productive triad and Porphyry's tree through Bacon's division into History, Poesy, and Philosophy, Dewey's decimal notation, and the four-faculty structure of the medieval and modern university, Machlup shows how branches split, fuse, vanish, and reappear as erudition grows. He restores science to its broad continental sense against the narrow Anglo-American restriction to natural science, and defends intellectual knowledge pursued for understanding, culture, or delight rather than utility. The second volume of his Knowledge project makes the map of learning itself the object of study, insisting that every classification is provisional and that no partition should be mistaken for the essence of what it orders.

But knowing for fun is a respectable human activity; and having fun need not be judged useless.

Not administrative regulation, not Coasean bargaining, not judicial balancing of 'social' costs—only a strict law of property, Rothbard argues, should govern air pollution. Reconstructing environmental tort law from libertarian first principles, he holds that coercion is justified solely against an overt physical invasion of another's person or justly held property: smoke, odor, dust, or excessive noise crossing a boundary, proven by strict causation beyond a reasonable doubt. His most distinctive move ties pollution to homesteading—a factory or airport that first emitted over unused land may acquire a prescriptive easement, leaving later arrivals to 'come to the nuisance.' From this follow his rejections of a general right to clean air, the ad coelum doctrine, statutory clean-air rules, vicarious 'deep pocket' liability, and binding class actions, and his proposal to collapse criminal law into a tort law prosecuted only by victims, heirs, or assigns.

In sum, no one has a right to clean air, but one does have a right to not have his air invaded by pollutants generated by an aggressor.