The archive.

A phrase can win moral authority precisely by escaping analysis, and social justice is Hayek's example. Read as a synonym for distributive justice, it presupposes a distributor, yet market incomes are assigned by no collective will, emerging instead from countless lawful actions whose combined result no one intends or foresees. Justice attaches to individual conduct, he argues, not to the aggregate pattern that many just actions produce. The demand for it he traces to atavism: moral instincts formed in the small face-to-face hunting band, admirable among intimates but maladapted to the extended order of strangers that property, contract, and catallaxy make possible. To impose a just distribution is to falsify the price signals that coordinate dispersed knowledge, revert to tribal sharing, and license coercion in the name of an undefined ideal.

The needs of this ancient primitive kind of society determined much of the moral feelings which still govern us, and which we approve in others.

Money re-enters general economic theory through individual action, marginal utility, and market exchange unfolding in time; that is the thread Rothbard follows in reconstructing Mises's monetary theory, which he traces to the 1912 Theory of Money and Credit. The demand for money becomes the demand to hold cash balances, and its purchasing power a heterogeneous array of exchange ratios rather than the inverse of some measurable price level. At the theoretical center stands Mises's regression theorem, which dissolves the apparent circularity of money's value by tracing it back through time to a commodity once valued for direct use. Along the way Rothbard turns the analysis against index-number thinking, Walrasian equilibrium, and government credit expansion, defending commodity money as the one check on political creation of purchasing power.

Every good and service will have an almost infinite array of prices in terms of every other good and service.

Behind Theory of Games and Economic Behavior lay a convergence of two unfinished programs. In this memoir, Morgenstern retraces the path from his 1928 work on economic forecasting, where the distinction between "dead" and "live" variables already anticipated strategic interaction and the Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty chase exposed the paradoxes of perfect foresight, to a Princeton encounter he describes as an instantaneous meeting of minds. What began as a short explanatory article grew, through walks and longhand collaboration, into a book that axiomatized expected utility, deployed minimax reasoning, and turned to convexity after his discovery of Jean Ville's proof. He recounts the Vienna Circle background, von Neumann's expanding-economy model, wartime printing by Princeton University Press, and the reviews and translations that followed, an origin story of game theory that doubles as a memorial to a friendship.

We did an enormous amount of work in a very short time, but it was unceasing pleasure and never a time of drudgery.

Does rising income increase household energy use, or change the equipment through which energy is consumed? In this exploratory conference contribution, Gerhard Tintner and Gabriele Wörgötter estimate demand for five fuels in Austria, finding sharply different relationships beneath the aggregate category of energy. Coal declines with income, while expanding ownership of electrical appliances and oil-fired central heating helps explain rising consumption elsewhere. Their petrol model makes the distinction especially concrete: income works chiefly through car ownership and engine capacity, with little additional effect once these are held constant. Readers can discover both the value and the limits of fuel-specific demand estimates: the authors connect coefficients to household circumstances while explicitly warning that statistical problems and changing supply conditions make their findings provisional.

Is Germany’s different economic position a European imbalance to remedy, or an example for its neighbours to follow? In this brief letter to The Times of December 21, 1976, Hayek answers Roy Jenkins’s reported concern with a blunt reversal: France, Britain and Italy should abandon what he calls their socialist policies and could then reach Germany’s position within a few years. The letter offers no comparative evidence or definition of those policies; its interest lies in the sharpness of the intervention. Hayek shifts attention from international disparity to domestic political choices, making Germany the model rather than the problem.

What makes an economy socialist: its welfare benefits and worker participation, or its controls over prices, investment and ownership? In this brief 1976 letter to The Times, republished here in 2022, Hayek challenges Nicholas Kaldor’s description of West Germany by pointing to its absence of nationalization and economic controls. Rather than assessing the social provisions Kaldor cited, he makes market coordination the decisive criterion and credits Ludwig Erhard’s removal of price controls with laying the foundation of German prosperity. The letter offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s way of drawing the boundary between social democracy and socialist planning—and with a causal claim he asserts here rather than demonstrates.

A 1970s American campaign for 'national economic planning,' fronted by Wassily Leontief and the Initiative Committee, revived a confusion Hayek believed the socialist calculation debate had already settled: it treated planning as though the question were whether anyone should think ahead, rather than who should direct resources and by what means. Distinguishing liberal planning of general rules from collectivist command, he answers the modernizing claim that complexity now demands central direction by reversing it, for the more intricate the web of interlocking activities, the less any board can survey it and the more indispensable the price mechanism becomes as a discovery procedure for dispersed knowledge. He dissects input-output tables, 'indicative planning,' and the Humphrey-Javits bill as machinery built without stated purpose, and warns that the pursuit of 'social justice' conceals a totalitarian assignment of tasks.

In fact, of course, the very complexity which the structure of modern economic systems has assumed provides the strongest argument against central planning.

Roosevelt rejected international currency stabilization in 1933; a decade later, his administration helped construct a dollar-centered monetary order. In this essay, first published in 1976 and reprinted in 2002, Murray N. Rothbard argues that the apparent reversal concealed a consistent pursuit of freedom to inflate, now joined to American financial predominance. Writing from an explicit preference for gold redemption and market discipline, he connects monetary arrangements to rival banking networks, exporters’ interests, and diplomatic leverage. His account complicates any simple opposition between business and the New Deal: industrialists and bankers could champion reflation while other financial interests resisted it. Following the passage from the failed London Economic Conference to Bretton Woods, readers can examine how domestic monetary discretion and international currency leadership became intertwined.

Stagflation, rapid inflation coexisting with substantial unemployment over a considerable period, was not supposed to happen, and the 1974-75 recession, the first worldwide postwar slump, made the anomaly impossible to ignore. Haberler treats it not as a natural feature of competitive markets but as the symptom of institutional obstruction: downward wage rigidity, union bargaining, indexation, farm supports, and regulation prevent relative prices from adjusting. Special factors like the oil and food shocks, he calculates, explain perhaps a fourth of the two-digit inflation; the rest is real-wage resistance by organized groups. His prescription is structural reform to enlarge competition, dismantling marketing orders, Davis-Bacon rules, the Buy American Act, and minimum-wage laws that price out the young, rather than incomes policy or election-year stimulus, which would only reignite inflation and invite the wage-price controls that lead toward rationing and planning.

The policy dilemma of stagflation is this: If macroeconomic monetary and fiscal policies try to counteract inflation, they increase unemployment; if they try to reduce unemployment they intensify inflation.

Between the wars, the restored gold standard was never the specie standard of 1914 but a fragile gold-exchange construction, hobbled by an overvalued pound, an undervalued franc, reparations, and the sterilization of gold in Paris and Washington. Tracing its restoration after 1923 and its collapse across the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and Japan, Haberler—here in the English translation of his 1976 German essay—argues that the Great Depression was no ordinary cyclical downswing but the product of banking failures, timid central banks, and the adjustable peg that turned devaluation into competitive depreciation. He weighs Hayek and Robbins's Austrian theory of credit-induced malinvestment against Hansen's secular stagnation and the structural-maladjustment school, and closes by contrasting the deflationary 1930s with the inflationary crisis of the 1970s.

If a death certificate for the gold standard is required, September 21, 1931 would be a reasonable date to put on it.

Friedman's proposal for a legislated rule fixing steady annual growth in the money stock is the target here, though Hazlitt takes care to salute the free-market economist behind it. Monetarists are right that money matters, he grants, but wrong to lean on a mechanical quantity theory: the value of money, like any good, is set by supply, demand, and subjective valuation, not by the arithmetic of MV = PT. He walks through the three stages of inflation, argues that a currency's quality and its holders' expectations move prices as surely as its quantity, and exposes 'velocity' as an after-the-fact excuse. The fatal defect, though, is political, hand the money supply to legislators and every recession becomes an argument for printing more.

So far as quantity is concerned, it is the expected future quantity of money, rather than the immediately existing quantity, that determines the exchange value of the monetary unit.

Democracy earns its worth, on Hayek's account, as nothing grander than a peaceful convention for removing a government without bloodshed, not as a guarantee against tyranny and certainly not as a warrant for whatever a temporary majority can assemble. The trouble is 'unlimited democracy,' in which the fusion of legislation and government in one sovereign assembly dissolves the Rule of Law and lets any parliamentary command pass for law. Delivered in Sydney in 1976, the lecture argues that omnipotent assemblies do not express a genuine will of the people but manufacture majorities through bargaining, an institutionalised blackmail and corruption dressed up as social justice. His remedy is constitutional: separate a true legislative assembly, empowered only to enact general rules, from a governmental one, with a court policing the boundary and legislators elected for a single long term.

The secret of decent government is precisely that the supreme power must be limited power — a power that can lay down rules limiting all other power — and which thus can restrain but not command the private citizen.