The archive.

Institutions can keep their legal form intact while their social meaning quietly reverses—and reforms that once made sense become, in Mises's word, atavistic. Written for a 1966 Festschrift honoring Jacques Rueff, the essay pursues the claim through two cases. Egalitarian land redistribution answered a feudal order where property tracked caste, conquest, and privilege; under the market it is incoherent, since consumers decide anew each day who shall own the factors of production and owners hold their land only by serving buyers efficiently. Favoritism toward debtors once meant relieving the poor against wealthy lenders, but capitalism has flipped the class map: ordinary people are the creditors, through savings and pensions, while the rich borrow. Gottfried Feder's Nazi slogan against interest slavery becomes Mises's emblem of the confusion, answered by the gold standard's protection of the common man's savings.

The owners are mandates of the consumers as it were, bound to employ their property as if it were entrusted to them by the people.

Keynes made an unforgettable impression even on those who could never accept his monetary theories, and Hayek, friend since their 1928 meeting and sparring partner after his 1931 move to London, begins here in that key of admiration. But recollection turns to reckoning. Recalling his laborious review of the Treatise on Money, only for Keynes to change his mind, Hayek explains why he never mounted a comparable assault on the General Theory, and locates his true objection not in any detail but in the whole macroeconomic approach. The Keynesian Revolution's lasting effect, he contends, was to elevate measurable aggregates over the relative prices and capital structures through which an economy actually coordinates, encouraging a sophisticated inflationism by assuming resources everywhere lie unused. He predicts the episode will one day appear a temporary aberration.

But the assumption that all goods and factors are available in excess makes the whole price system redundant, undetermined and unintelligible.

Shackle opposes reason to imagination and probability to poetry, without discarding knowledge: business policy, he argues, is an originative art conducted under radical uncertainty, not the solving of a well-posed problem. He builds a scale of openness from dice and cards, which yield a complete list of outcomes, through horse-racing to new enterprise, which has no card of runners and no book of rules. Decision is commitment to a future that does not yet exist, and therefore choice among imagined possibilities rather than known facts. Where probability demands an exhaustive list of contingencies, he substitutes judgments of possibility, surprise, and ascendancy, with focus-gain and focus-loss standing for an enterprise in deliberation. Success, he concludes, needs not only the axial mind that reasons toward a solution but the radial imagination that sees outward into an expanding field of possible histories.

My first proposition is that decision is choice amongst the products of imagination.

Production technology alone does not determine how an economy holds together or how fast it can expand. In this 1966 research report, Oskar Morgenstern and Gerald L. Thompson extend von Neumann’s growth model to distinguish the effects of private and public consumption and saving. Their example of wheat, entertainment and diamonds makes a precise point: consumer demand can connect sectors that production requirements leave separate. The extension also breaks the original model’s equality between expansion and interest factors. Using matrix games and numerical examples, the authors distinguish proving that equilibrium exists from explaining which equilibrium will prevail. Readers can discover how preferences and government allocations reshape a formal growth economy—and why identical technological and preference data may still leave its outcome undetermined.

What presents itself as a review of Hicks's Capital and Growth becomes a sustained challenge to equilibrium growth theory itself. Lachmann admires Hicks as a broker between the Marshallian, Paretian, Wicksellian, and Keynesian traditions, and welcomes his refusal of homogeneous capital, yet he presses one question the models cannot answer: can an economy actually traverse from one growth path to another? During any such transition the capital stock must be reshaped while relative prices, technology, expectations, and wealth distribution all shift, so the price system required for the new equilibrium can never be known in advance. Malinvestment, mentioned only once in Hicks's book, is for Lachmann a normal feature of a world where capital goods embody past plans and expectations diverge, revisable and causally powerful.

In this way he has become a prominent mediator between different strands of thought, a broker of ideas whose influence has been far greater than is often realised today.

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.

A public quarrel among Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Walter Heller over tight money and recession opens this 1966 essay, which Sennholz quickly recasts as a deeper confusion over what inflation even is. Properly, he insists, inflation means the expansion of money and credit; rising prices are only its delayed effect, and by narrowing the word to prices officials shift blame from the central bank to business and labor. Marshaling figures on Federal Reserve credit, Treasury currency, and bank deposits from 1960 to 1966, he builds an Austrian diagnosis: cheap manufactured money signals savings that do not exist, luring investment that later collapses. The 'zigzag course' of 1966 shows a Fed trapped between lowering prices and lowering rates. The ration book, he warns, waits at the end of the road.

The Federal Reserve Banks fathered the Great Society boom through vast injections of money and credit.

Herbert Hoover’s reputation as a defender of laissez-faire is the target of Murray N. Rothbard’s review of Albert U. Romasco’s The Poverty of Abundance, first published in 1966 and supplied here in its 1970 anthology reprint. Rothbard asks what “voluntary” economic cooperation meant when federal coercion stood behind it. Through trade associations, agricultural price supports, and government-backed lending, he argues that Hoover helped build the machinery Roosevelt would extend. His distinctive concern is not simply how much government intervened, but which organized producers benefited at whose expense. Yet continuity has a limit: Hoover rejected the compulsory industrial organization proposed in the Swope Plan. The review offers a pointed way to distinguish support for business from support for competitive markets—and to reconsider where Hoover’s break with the New Deal actually lay.

Behind the Bretton Woods debates over how much gold and foreign exchange a country ought to hold lies a prior question Machlup insists economists have dodged: whether monetary authorities can be said to need reserves at all. Distinguishing need from desire and demand, he defines a need by the consequences of its absence — devaluation, deflation, exchange controls — and turns that test against the familiar ratios of reserves to imports, money supply, or past deficits, which he finds describe convention rather than requirement. Data from fourteen industrial countries between 1949 and 1965 show variation no single formula explains. His wife's-wardrobe analogy reframes the matter: what a growing world economy needs is not a particular stock but annual additions to reserves, enough to keep governments from lurching toward restriction.

This article will address itself to the question whether it is possible to find any objective criteria for the need of monetary reserves, either for individual countries or for the world at large.

Ricardo's observation that insecurity drives capital to flee abroad sets the theme of this 1966 essay, which tracks how the nineteenth century's world trade in capital goods gave way to twentieth-century hostility toward saving itself. Foreign investment, Mises argues, was never conquest but a transfer of capital to lands unable to generate it; recast by socialist and nationalist doctrine as 'imperialism,' its expropriation gets dressed up as 'liberation,' and voluntary investment predictably vanishes. He then turns on union productivity statistics: output per worker reflects the capital equipment behind the worker, not effort alone, so crediting every gain to labor leaves nothing for the savers who financed the tools. Progressive income, corporate, and inheritance taxes complete the confiscation of 'unearned' returns—and the mechanism of accumulation quietly dies.

Saving, capital accumulation and investment will no longer pay and will come to an end.

Freedom, on this account, depends far less on who holds power than on how far power may reach. Reconstructing classical liberalism as a theory of law-governed order, Hayek separates the English Old Whig tradition of Hume, Smith and Acton from the Continental constructivism he traces to Rousseau and the French Revolution, and insists that liberalism and democracy answer entirely different questions. He renames the market a catallaxy to dispel the fiction that society is one great household with shared ends, grounds liberty in private property and general rules of just conduct, and dismisses 'social' or distributive justice as nonsense in an order where no one distributes. First delivered to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1966, the paper closes on the three great negatives that must govern all coercion: peace, justice and liberty.

Liberalism and democracy, although compatible, are not the same. The first is concerned with the extent of governmental power, the second with who holds this power.

What can sustain a lifelong, costly alienation from the status quo when victory seems distant? Rothbard dismisses the thin answers—liberty as intellectual amusement, or as a route to private profit—and rejects even utilitarian forecasts of abundance as too weak to command sacrifice. The durable ground, he insists, is a passion for justice, and his central move is to distinguish injustice from misfortune: poverty yields only slowly to capital and time, but injustice is an action men inflict on other men and can therefore cease at once. English rule in Ireland, wage and price controls, chattel slavery—each could be ended by will. Invoking Leonard Read's button and William Lloyd Garrison's demand for immediate emancipation, Rothbard casts the true libertarian as a radical abolitionist who states the end without dilution.

In framing principle, it is of the utmost importance not to mix in strategic estimates with the forging of desired goals.