The archive.

What should an account of automation offer beyond technical explanation? In this brief 1958 review, Richard Kerschagl praises the German translation of Georges Hartmann’s book for combining clear concepts with little-known numerical data, reserving particular approval for its treatment of economic and social consequences. His notice offers no examples or detailed critique; its interest lies in the standards of usefulness it articulates and its explicit recognition of French scholarship as a resource for German-speaking readers.

How much can readable monetary journalism achieve when its historical claims do not withstand scholarly scrutiny? In this brief review of Rudolf Mühlfenzl’s Interview mit dem Geld, Richard Kerschagl questions statements about the Lydians and John Law and faults a bibliography restricted to books published in Germany. Yet he distinguishes these weaknesses from the book’s usefulness to lay readers. His qualified endorsement offers a compact example of critical judgement that values accessibility without confusing it with scholarly authority: an entertaining introduction may foster understanding and prompt readers to seek more rigorous work.

Governmental honors need not silence a scientist’s remorse over helping to produce atomic weapons; legal condemnation need not extinguish a sense of duty. In this brief essay, Schütz uses such conflicts to distinguish being held responsible from feeling responsible—and responsibility for an act from accountability to an authority. Drawing on Max Weber’s distinction between an actor’s meaning and an observer’s interpretation, he argues that external judgment cannot exhaust responsibility’s subjective dimension. His distinctions clarify why accepting responsibility for a deed need not mean recognizing the right of a government to judge it, and why the same duty can mean different things to those who impose it and those who live under it.

Duty has a different meaning as defined by me autonomously and as imposed on me from outside.

A defense system can become more dangerous as it becomes more powerful. In this separately published Sandia lecture, Oskar Morgenstern asks how American scientific and military capacity might preserve room for political choice rather than force an immediate, catastrophic response. Speaking after Soviet space successes, he connects deterrence to the everyday organization of research: interrupted funding, restricted information exchange, and failures of independent weapons evaluation. His case for survivable retaliatory forces rests on the same principle as his criticism of massive retaliation: security should allow time, restraint, and acceptance of limited defeat. Even civilian shelters, he argues, may threaten stability if their rapid construction signals preparations for attack. The report offers a concrete encounter with strategic reasoning in which better weapons are not enough; institutions and signals must sustain a negotiable balance.

If either opponent attempts to win too much from the other he stands to lose all.

When an economist calls a country's troubles 'structural,' Machlup suspects he is more often excusing a policy than analyzing a problem, and here he puts the word on trial. He sorts its economic uses into three piles: clear senses worth keeping, such as the structure of production or econometric structural equations; vaguer senses better avoided, where structure means the slow-moving or the merely institutional; and a crypto-apologetic group in which structural imbalance props up cartels, price controls, exchange restrictions, and import barriers. Diagnosing a situation as structural disequilibrium, he argues, usually substitutes terminology for analysis. In a candid postscript he concedes that his least favorite examples happen to be policies he dislikes, an admission that his own politics may color which meanings he finds clear.

Structure, I am afraid, is often a weaselword used to avoid commitment to a definite and clear thought.

How can freedom be justified when its results cannot be predicted? In this 1958 contribution to Essays on Individuality, Friedrich August von Hayek makes uncertainty the basis of his answer: nobody knows in advance whose experiments will yield discoveries useful to others. Knowledge resides not only in scientific propositions but also in skills, habits, tools, and institutions that people use without fully understanding. This perspective connects ordinary practical initiative with intellectual discovery—and explains why a freedom exercised by very few may benefit many. The essay offers a pointed account of the tension between rational control and learning: attempts to admit only demonstrably beneficial activities may suppress the unforeseen experiences through which accepted knowledge, practices, and values can change.

Freedom granted only where it can be known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial would not be freedom.

The demand that produced the Federal Reserve was for a 'more flexible currency,' but Sennholz reads flexibility as legalized discretion rather than market responsiveness. Tracing the system to the panic of 1907 and to European models—the Bank of England's lender-of-last-resort doctrine, the Reichsbank's elastic note issue—he dissects its three instruments of credit control: rediscounting, open-market operations, and reserve requirements. Each, he argues, lets appointed governors manufacture money by administrative decision, while member banks' nominal ownership of the Reserve Banks masks decisive political control. The charge is that a body advertised as neutral monetary technique is in fact the governing board of a socialized monetary industry—the engine of dollar depreciation, boom and bust, and deficit finance. Written for American Opinion in 1958, the essay ends not in reform but abolition.

For in payment for securities the Federal Reserve merely draws, on itself, a check which constitutes newly created money.

Neither instant copying nor a permanent monopoly serves an economy: some delay rewards the innovator who bore the sunk costs, but prompt competitive imitation is what turns one firm's advance into a general rise in productivity. From that premise Machlup builds a spare model of quasi-rents discounted over an expected imitation lag, and uses it to doubt that patents earn their keep. Long fixed terms, he argues, are a blunt instrument, too generous for cheap innovations, too weak for costly ones, and undercut anyway by circum-invention, substitutes, and discounting. The strongest case for a patent system, he suggests, is that it fosters a socially useful illusion of protection; the true optimum lag lies far closer to an innovator's natural head start than to sixteen years of statutory delay. The essay honors Fredrik Zeuthen.

To buy innovation by paying with unnecessarily long delays of imitation is a poor bargain for society to make.

Can smaller firms automate without surrendering their independence? In this 1958 article on West Germany, Hans Bayer connects the practical limits of new machinery with the economics of scale, credit, and cooperation. Continuous chemical production and variable timber processing present different technical possibilities; access to equipment does not by itself make either investment viable. For smaller enterprises, specialization, modular machinery, and shared computing services offer alternatives to dependence on large customers—but financing and subcontracting can also erode autonomy. Bayer argues that successful adaptation requires coordinated production and standardization, not merely loans. His account lets readers examine automation as an organizational problem: who can achieve sufficient output, who directs cooperation, and what independence costs when competitive survival demands modernization.

Higher money wages need not mean better living standards: this distinction drives Ludwig von Mises’s article, first published in 1958 and republished here in 1962. Mises argues that capital investment makes lasting wage increases possible, while wages forced above market rates create unemployment. His sharper distinction concerns responsibility: unions, he maintains, do not themselves create inflation; governments expand money and credit to avert the unemployment that wage demands would otherwise produce. The result is temporary relief purchased through falling real wages. This polemical account offers a concrete way to examine the tension between employment policy and monetary stability—and to consider workers not only as wage recipients, but as consumers and savers whose deposits, bonds, and insurance claims inflation can erode.

Inflation can cure unemployment only by curtailing the wage earner's real wages.

The sprawling ambition here is a synthesis: to show that economics cannot be severed from philosophy, sociology, history, and value, and to read the modern economy through recurring tensions rather than static equilibrium. Bayer sorts a vast empirical field, from consumer sovereignty undone by advertising through class stratification, social security, nationalization in Austria and Britain, European integration, and the rival plans of China, India, and Russia, into four fundamental tensions: absolute versus relative values, production versus consumption, money versus goods, and individual versus totality. The immoderation he ascribes to so-called capitalism follows, he argues, from absolutizing what are merely relative values. His remedy is Wirtschaftsgestaltung, economic design built from below through firms, cooperatives, municipal economy, and codetermination, with only residual tasks reserved for the top.

Der Mensch ist mittelbar und unmittelbar Gestalter und Ziel der Wirtschaft.

English translation: “Man is, both indirectly and directly, the shaper and the goal of the economy.”

Across every front of postwar economic policy—money, cartels, rents, agriculture, public finance—Amonn diagnoses the same disorder: isolated, "pointillist" interventions that each summon the next until a market order slides toward central planning. Invoking Eucken's interdependence of orders, he shows how cheap money invites credit expansion, inflation, and then price controls. He reads the 1957 Law Against Restraints of Competition as a prohibition so laced with exceptions that it becomes abuse-control by another name, defends rent decontrol against entrenched tenant privilege, attacks cost-covering agricultural prices, and rejects Keynesian deficit finance and redistributive taxation alike. His guiding maxim, aligned with Erhard's "prosperity for all," is in dubio pro libertate—when in doubt, decide for freedom.

Will man den einkommenschwachen Schichten, die es nötig haben, helfen, so kann dies — und soll dies — durch sozialpolitische Maßnahmen geschehen, wie es bis anhin als Regel gegolten hat. Das ist etwas wesentlich anderes als die Umverteilung der Einkommen.

English translation: “If one wishes to help the low-income strata who are in need, this can — and should — be done through social-policy measures, as has hitherto been the rule. That is something essentially different from the redistribution of incomes.”