The archive.

Record American deficits piled up through the late 1960s, yet confidence in the dollar held—a puzzle Haberler and Willett resolve by arguing that the world had drifted onto a de facto dollar standard in which the currency was inconvertible into gold for large official sums, and that the very gap between the gold stock and dollar liabilities made mass conversion unthinkable. From this they draw the case for what they call benign neglect: because the United States cannot unilaterally devalue a currency everyone else pegs to, it should pursue domestic stability and curb inflation while leaving adjustment to surplus countries, which may accumulate dollars, appreciate, expand, or lower trade barriers. Written just before the August 1971 suspension of convertibility, the essay presses for modest exchange-rate flexibility—crawling pegs, wider bands, floating—over the distortions of capital and trade controls.

whenever a serious dilemma or conflict between the requirements of external and internal equilibrium arises, domestic policy objectives should take precedence over balance-of-payments considerations

Can a predictable monetary rule prevent instability if credit expansion itself distorts investment? In this essay, Hans Sennholz welcomes Milton Friedman’s challenge to Keynesian economics, but argues that monetarism retains key premises of the approach it challenges: reliance on economic aggregates and government monetary management. Against Friedman’s proposed steady growth of the money supply, Sennholz argues that even modest expansion can depress interest rates below levels warranted by saving and encourage unsustainable investments. The contrast brings a concrete disagreement into focus: stable prices need not mean coordinated production. Readers can discover why an Austrian defence of markets may reject monetarist policy, and how Sennholz’s case for gold and freedom of monetary contract shifts the debate from choosing better management rules to questioning monetary authority itself.

Before poverty can be relieved it must be defined, and this 1971 essay argues that loose, relative definitions turn a real but bounded problem into an endlessly expanding political claim. To call the bottom fifth or third 'poor' confuses inequality with poverty and guarantees the problem can never be solved, since some group is always comparatively worse off. Hazlitt dissects the Johnson-era war on poverty's shifting thresholds, leaning on Rose D. Friedman's recalculation that, adjusting for family size and food-spending patterns, roughly halved the official poverty rate. Applied backward to 1929 or outward to India, today's American thresholds redescribe historic abundance as mass want. Poverty, he concludes, should be pegged to subsistence sufficient for health and strength, not to median income, lest relief outrun what work can earn and dependency become rational.

It is obvious, however, that all merely relative definitions of poverty make the problem insoluble.

Education, in Rothbard's account, is the whole lifelong forming of a person's reason, values, and knowledge, and schooling only a narrow slice of it — one that compulsion perverts into an instrument of rule. Because children differ radically in ability, pace, and temperament, he holds that individualized parental or tutorial instruction outperforms the classroom, which must impose a single curriculum on unlike minds. The historical chapters trace mandatory schooling from Luther and Calvin, who wielded it to enforce religious uniformity, to Prussia, where a militarized bureaucracy standardized language and manufactured obedient subjects. America, in his telling, is only a softer republican version of the same transfer of authority from family to state — a compulsory public press for the child's mind, breeding dependence where it claims to build citizens.

The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child?

Growth and development economics, for all its bulk, conceals a yawning gap: it has mislaid the entrepreneur. Kirzner sets out to recover him, distinguishing the routine economizing that allocates given means to given ends from the entrepreneurial element proper, alertness to opportunities, ends, and means not yet noticed. Against Schumpeter, whose innovator disrupts a placid circular flow, he casts the entrepreneur as an equilibrating force, one who perceives the gaps between input costs and output values that only disequilibrium and imperfect knowledge create. Development, on this reading, is not an external shock but the discovery and seizing of profit opportunities already waiting; the market's distinctive virtue is that its profit signals prompt that discovery, where nonmarket systems supply no equivalent mechanism.

The theory of the market explores the extent to which economizing decisions of many independent market participants can be carried out simultaneously.

Sincere reformers and demagogues alike have reached for the same lever—state action—to abolish poverty, and in Hazlitt's telling they have mostly made it worse. This 1971 Freeman polemic dismantles a catalogue of political remedies: redistribution and the guaranteed income, union privilege and featherbedding, minimum-wage laws, welfare finance, price and wage controls, and finally socialism itself. His method is to look past the visible transfer to the hidden cost—who pays, whose incentives collapse, what output is never produced. A statutory wage floor, he insists, cannot conjure the productivity it names; it only prices the least-skilled out of work. Socialism's deeper failure is the calculation problem: without genuine prices for capital goods, planners cannot rank alternatives except by imitating the market they reject. Durable relief, he concludes, rests on productivity, not command.

We cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him less.

Freedom, inequality, and the division of labor are not separable social accidents but mutually supporting conditions of civilization, so runs the thesis of an essay first delivered to a 1970 symposium and reissued in 1991 with a combative new introduction. Because each person is a unique, non-interchangeable individual, Rothbard argues, liberty is the precondition of human development; and only a developed division of labor, rooted in the natural diversity Mises made central, gives individuality the scope to flourish. Egalitarianism, Marxist, Romantic, primitivist, he treats as a single anti-differentiating impulse, from Marx's fantasy of hunting, fishing, and criticizing at will to the lookism and quotas of what the new introduction calls political correctness. Equality taken literally means sameness; against it he defends the older liberal equality of liberty, and natural aristocracies that rise through voluntary excellence rather than force.

He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.

Allowing international trade in a growth model does not guarantee that trade will occur—or that a feasible growth path will be efficient. In this 1971 contribution, republished in 2013, Oskar Morgenstern and Gerald L. Thompson revisit their open-economy extension of the von Neumann model by removing an assumption that had helped secure positive-valued trade. Their distinctive concern is the distance between mathematical possibility and economic interpretation. A numerical example permits the expansion factor to fall below the interest factor; two internal accounting indices then clarify why the authors regard such solutions as economically uninteresting for a one-country economy. Readers can discover how price and activity bounds shape that judgement, and why the authors favor economically transparent axioms over formal compression.

Ninety days of frozen wages and prices gave Nixon's New Economic Policy of August 1971 its drama, but Haberler asks the harder question of what happens once the freeze is lifted. A freeze, he warns, suspends visible price changes without touching demand, wage bargaining, or credibility; hold it too long and it breeds evasion, bureaucracy, and corruption. The essay's hinge is a distinction between two incomes policies: guideposts and controls that substitute official judgment for the market, and reforms that restore competition by curbing union privileges, revising Davis-Bacon and minimum-wage rules, ending strike subsidies, and opening the door to imports. Sustained inflation, he holds, is always monetary, yet monopoly unions can still force authorities to choose between validating wage push and accepting unemployment. Business monopoly, by contrast, produces mostly one-shot effects and matters far less to a continuing spiral.

Industrial monopolies or oligopolies are not much of a problem as far as inflation is concerned.

A national-income total can rise because traffic wastes fuel or a catastrophe requires repairs. For Oskar Morgenstern, such cases expose a problem that greater numerical precision cannot solve: what do economic figures actually measure? In this article, presented in its 1972 Spanish translation, he challenges both misleading aggregates and the confidence placed in calculations whose inputs remain uncertain. His perspective joins statistical criticism to a concrete concern with computation: nearly identical coefficients can produce radically different solutions. Yet his argument is not against mathematics or economic theory. It asks what makes their use responsible. Readers can discover why precise observations need not yield reliable forecasts, why successful predictions need not establish a theory’s truth, and why acknowledging error is a condition of rigor rather than a confession of failure.

Oskar Lange had been Mises's most formidable socialist antagonist; his final, posthumous treatise, Rothbard argues, quietly retreated toward the praxeology it once opposed. Reading Lange's late Political Economy, Rothbard tracks the concessions: that monetary calculation and profit-seeking made rational conduct explicit, that economic laws can be deduced from broad axioms of rational action, that Austrian utility theory is ordinal preference rather than hedonistic psychology. Each admission carries a threat Lange cannot face—if economics simply is praxeology, Marxism forfeits its claim to be the foundational science of historical economic forms. So Lange widens praxeology to swallow cybernetics, programming, and input-output analysis, grafting institutional categories onto the logic of choice. Rothbard reads the maneuver as evasion, and draws the larger point: the calculation debate was always also a contest over the foundations of economics.

In this way, Lange accepts the essential deductive Misesian methodology for economic theory: beginning with broadly general praxeological principles as axioms and from these elaborating necessary laws by logical deduction.

Lachmann casts Mises as the economist who decisively rejected equilibrium as the master concept of economics and put the market process in its place. Contemporary neoclassical theory he indicts as 'late classical formalism,' mathematically elegant yet mute on real problems like permanent inflation, because it abstracts from choice, alternatives, and uncertainty. The newer models of steady growth—Cassel, Harrod, Domar, Solow—fare no better, since continuous coordination would demand perfect foresight and the instantaneous rearrangement of heterogeneous capital. Because knowledge is unevenly held and interpreted, expectations diverge and plans must fail. What survives is individual equilibrium, never the system-wide kind; the market is millions of people seeking their own equilibria within an order that never reaches a general one.

But in doing so they have taken the shadow of the formal apparatus for the substance of the real subject matter.