The archive.

Machlup gathered definitions of statics and dynamics from Comte through Patinkin and laid them side by side, only to find the terms pulling in incompatible directions: social order versus progress, stationary states versus growth, undated versus lagged variables. His mischievous observation is that economists tend to call their own theories dynamic and their rivals' static. Rather than legislate a single meaning, he builds a six-part typology that lets a theory like Schumpeter's qualify as dynamic under half a dozen headings at once, and shows how the supposed war between equilibrium and evolutionary economics dissolves once the labels are unpacked. His practical advice: retire the two words where possible in favor of exact ones, growth theory, sequence analysis, period analysis, trend analysis.

The trouble, as I see it, is not that the division of economic analysis into Statics and Dynamics makes no sense, but that it makes too many senses.

Nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and the sheer speed of technological change have made national defense a strategic problem that inherited military categories can no longer grasp. Treating the arms race as a grim equilibrium, Morgenstern argues that neither side can safely reduce effort unless reductions are mutual, credible, and enforceable, so survival becomes a constraint prior to any budget. Defense is never a matter of the single best weapon but of strategies tested against an adapting opponent: interception screens answer yesterday's threat while the next generation is designed to evade them, and stopgaps such as keeping bombers permanently airborne founder on fuel and logistics. Cities, valuable and hard to protect, pose the severest problem. Rejecting both panic and wishful thinking, he makes the case that creative technical thinking, not standardized production, will decide survival.

Unilateral action to reduce the arms race is impossible and not compatible with the desire for national survival.

Strip away the geopolitical alarmism, Mises urges, and the contest between socialism and capitalism reduces to a single measurable test: whether socialism raises the ordinary person's standard of living, as its advocates always promised. By that self-chosen standard, he argues, Soviet planning had already failed—decades of plans, purges, and boasts had left the common man far poorer than his counterpart in capitalist Western Europe or the United States. Capitalism, in this compressed Cold War essay, is nothing but mass production for the masses, a system that raises the worker toward the bourgeois level by serving him. The regime's censorship is itself the confession: it endures only by keeping its citizens from learning how ordinary people live under freedom.

Experience has belied all this empty boasting.

We plan by imagining what we will have accomplished—but carrying out a plan changes what we know and what its accomplishment means to us. This tension anchors Alfred Schütz’s inquiry into knowledge of the future. Beginning with Tiresias, whose certain foreknowledge offers no power to intervene, Schütz turns to the less certain but practically useful expectations of ordinary life. His phenomenological perspective locates foresight in socially acquired knowledge, familiar patterns, and the interests that make some possibilities matter more than others. The essay’s distinctive insight is that projects anticipate completed acts rather than merely picturing actions ahead. It gives readers a precise way to understand why expectations can guide conduct reliably without ever capturing an event exactly as it will occur.

Does the merchandise trade balance rise or fall when a nation's economy expands? The empirical record, Mintz found, had scarcely been examined, though contradictory assumptions abounded. Working with quarterly American and British data from 1880 to 1938 and the Burns-Mitchell cycle method, she establishes that both balances swing in long cycles closely tied to domestic business, yet in opposite ways. The American balance moved inversely, sinking in late expansions and recovering sharply in early contractions; the British balance conformed positively before 1914 and then reversed to become perfectly inverse after the war. Refining the picture with a world-cycle chronology of co-phases and counter-phases, she overturns the belief that all creditor or industrial countries share a single cyclical pattern, and traces the British reversal to altered terms of trade rather than to industrialization.

General expansion depressed, contraction improved the trade balance.

Can freely imagining variations of an object disclose its essence—or does the familiar type already determine what we can imagine? In this essay, Alfred Schütz presses that question against Husserl’s accounts of everyday experience and eidetic intuition. Recognizing a dog involves expectations acquired through previous encounters; discovering an essence is supposed to reach beyond such contingent familiarity. Schütz asks what warrants the passage between them. His attention to interest and selective attention makes the difficulty concrete: resemblance alone cannot explain which features count when we recognize something as a kind of thing. Readers can discover how an apparently technical distinction between type and essence bears on the limits of phenomenological method, without mistaking Schütz’s conditional challenge for a dismissal of Husserl’s project.

Why should government programmes count as planning while the plans of savers and entrepreneurs do not? In this published discussion contribution, Ludwig von Mises challenges the vocabulary as well as the instruments of development policy. He contrasts the infrastructure financed by nineteenth-century foreign investment with the expropriation, exchange controls, and inflation that, he argues, discourage capital formation. His distinctive emphasis falls on the connection between monetary stability and ordinary people’s ability to save through deposits, bonds, and insurance. The resulting criticism of foreign aid asks whether public spending can remedy capital shortages while governments undermine private accumulation. These compact, polemical remarks offer a clear account of why Mises treats poverty not simply as a shortage of resources, but as a problem of the conditions governing investment.

The plans of the individuals do not count; they are just no planning.

When Walter Reuther pressed his 1958 wage demands on behalf of the United Automobile Workers, Hayek seized on them as a test case for a broader warning about legally privileged group power. Modern unions, he argues, owe their strength not to freedom of association but to the tolerated coercion of workers willing to accept other terms, and their wage pressure turns inflationary only once monetary authorities feel bound to supply whatever credit full employment demands at any wage. Distinguishing average output from the marginal productivity of labour, he brands the claim on productivity gains generated by capital an attempted expropriation, and reads Reuther's profit-sharing scheme as a step toward syndicalism—not public ownership, but the seizure of enterprise returns by closed groups of incumbent workers who supply none of the capital.

Inflation-born prosperity has never been and never will be lasting prosperity.

Because dependent earners form the majority of the population, Bayer treats their place in economic policy not as a workplace detail but as the pivot on which democracy either becomes real or lapses into empty form. He defines the workforce broadly, as all dependent earners for whom being ruled outweighs ruling, and maps three routes of participation: the occupational, running from firm-level codetermination up through branch committees; the common-economy route of cooperatives, municipal enterprise, and the nationalized sector; and the political route of elections and referenda. Firm-level co-ownership and profit-sharing in monopoly firms he rejects as blind alleys. Grounding the whole case in the economy's purpose, the securing of material foundations for personality development, he warns of a negative accelerator in which absent institutions dampen interest, and absent interest blocks the institutions.

Es geht darum, die Gefahren einer bloß formalen Demokratie zu vermeiden und lebendige Demokratie sicherzustellen.

English translation: “The task is to avoid the dangers of a merely formal democracy and to ensure a living democracy.”

Switzerland, Amonn argues, has accumulated so many collectivist interventions that it can no longer honestly be called a market economy, whatever its constitution's guarantees of commercial freedom. Dedicated to Fritz Marbach, this critical survey turns a sharp eye on Swiss cartels, on the milk regime whose guaranteed prices breed gluts, on cost-covering agricultural prices that capitalize into ever-rising land values, and above all on wartime rent control, which he indicts at length for freezing the housing market, privileging sitting tenants over young families, and letting the building stock decay. He leans on the Federal Price Formation Commission's report and its standard of "possible competition," traces recent price rises to imported inflation, and warns that permanent rent control amounts, in Otto Bauer's own terms, to socialization by other means.

When does a promise of human emancipation become a prohibition on asking questions? In Wissenschaft, Politik und Gnosis, Eric Voegelin examines systems that, in his reading, protect their claims to liberating knowledge by excluding inquiry into their premises. Marx’s account of human self-production and Hegel’s promise of completed knowledge become tests of the boundary between philosophical inquiry and intellectual domination. Voegelin’s distinctive argument is theological as well as political: he contends that projects of human self-salvation require the speculative abolition of an order humanity did not create. His comparison of medieval Golem legends with modern self-creation sharpens the stakes—whether makers can acknowledge limits and undo their work. Readers encounter both a diagnosis of ideological closure and the demanding conception of transcendence on which that diagnosis rests.

Foreign-exchange controls can undermine the balance they are meant to protect: cheap official foreign currency encourages imports while penalizing exporters. In this 1959 article, Richard Kerschagl traces that contradiction through compulsory surrender, rationed allocations, clearing arrangements, and blocked capital transfers. His attention to administrative detail shows how traders adapt to controls through invoice prices and third-country transactions, shifting monetary distortions into trade. Yet his case for realistic exchange rates is not a promise that markets alone will secure stability. Liberalization, he argues, requires credible restraint on inflation and effective coordination of economic policy, with a substantial role for the central bank. The article offers a concrete account of why removing restrictions and establishing durable convertibility are different tasks.