The archive.

Obeying a law binding on everyone is not the same as submitting to state dictates: this distinction drives Hayek’s brief 1977 letter to The Times, republished here in 2022. Replying to Arthur Palmer, he argues that British trade unions claim exemptions incompatible with equality before the law, and attributes Britain’s economic decline chiefly to their conduct. His proposed test is concrete: Parliament should hear from business leaders operating comparable enterprises in Britain and continental Europe, including Henry Ford II. The letter offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s understanding of liberty—and with the gap between his forceful causal claim and the comparative business testimony he proposes to substantiate it.

For Hayek, the crucial boundary in trade-union law lies between acting collectively and compelling others to do so. In this short letter to The Times, published in 1977 and reproduced here in the 2022 version, he answers Peter Wallington’s defence of union immunities by distinguishing voluntary membership and striking from compulsory membership and enforced participation. Drawing on his experience in England and his residence in a country where the closed shop is constitutionally inadmissible, Hayek makes a sweeping claim: removing special union privileges would restore British prosperity. The letter offers a concentrated encounter with his anti-coercion perspective—and with the distance between a precise distinction about freedom and a national economic diagnosis asserted without supporting data.

What is at issue is not union membership but compulsory union membership and not the right to strike but the right to compel others to strike.

An apparently harmless compliment provokes Hayek’s protest in this brief 1977 letter to the Times Literary Supplement, republished here in 2022. Calling a book ‘well-researched’, he argues, confuses the activity that produced it with the achievement embodied in it. His grammatical objection becomes a defence of scholarly dignity: would the phrase adequately describe Newton’s Principia or Einstein’s general theory of relativity? The letter offers a pointed occasion to consider what reviewers actually praise when they praise research—and why Hayek hears an insult where others might hear approval.

Before answering Parsons, Schütz asks for time to read him carefully. This brief private letter of 10 February 1941, presented in its 1977 German translation, acknowledges Parsons’s third letter and promises a detailed response to all three. Schütz balances that commitment against the demands that may delay his answer for several weeks. The note offers no theoretical argument; its interest lies in the practical preparation for one, documenting the scope of the reply Schütz intends and his effort to reassure his correspondent without promising an immediate answer.

What exactly counts as money? Rothbard's answer refuses the Chicago school's habit of choosing a monetary aggregate because it correlates with national income—statistical fit, he argues, evades the prior question of what money is. Returning to Mises's definition of money as the generally accepted medium of exchange, he counts demand deposits and other claims the public treats as redeemable at par in standard money, while excluding stocks, bonds, and real estate that are merely liquid and must first be sold. The functional test yields his aggregate Ma: cash plus fixed-rate redeemable claims. A second measure, Mb, isolates newly created bank money entering business credit—the channel that, in Austrian cycle theory, distorts the structure of production toward higher-order capital goods, distinct from deficit finance or consumer lending.

Furthermore, the approach overlooks the fact that statistical correlation cannot establish causal connections; this can only be done by a genuine theory that works with definable and defined concepts.

The instruments to stop inflation exist; the will does not, and that gap is Hayek's diagnosis in this 1978 lecture. Central banks command the base of the credit pyramid, but democratic commitments to full employment, coupled with unions that push money wages above market-clearing levels, make expansion the path of least resistance. Drawing on Mises, Hume, and Cantillon, he shows that new money enters at particular points and spreads as a price gradient rather than a uniform rise, misleading entrepreneurs and corrupting accounting so that spurious profits are taxed as though real. Because the stimulus works only by surprise, inflation must accelerate to keep its effect, and stop-go policy grows ever more unstable. Durable stability, he concludes, requires restoring flexible wage determination before any international reform can hold.

My main aim tonight is to bring out clearly why we must stop inflation if we are to preserve a viable society of free men.

A dispute over how much inflation to tolerate becomes, in Hayek’s hands, a challenge to government’s exclusive right to issue money. In this 1978 letter to the Sunday Times, presented in an annotated 2022 reprint, he disputes the label “deflation” and argues that the pain of stabilisation should be traced to earlier monetary expansion. His distinctive move is to shift attention from policymakers’ choices to their incentives: governments face pressure to manufacture more money, whereas competing private issuers would have to preserve the value users prefer. The letter offers a compact encounter with the reasoning behind his currency proposal, linking the language of a British policy controversy to the practical question of what makes money worth holding.

No genuine reform of the international monetary system emerged from the 1976 Jamaica Agreement — so Machlup argues in this sharp commentary answering Dr. Slighton’s defense, which, read carefully, concedes nearly every charge the prosecution had made. The agreement supplies neither an adequate adjustment mechanism nor an orderly means of controlling international liquidity, and liquidity and adjustment, he insists, hang together: reserve-rich countries postpone correction while intervening ones inflate their money supplies. Against the claim that flexible rates impose their own discipline, he notes that internationally, borrowed reserves can enlarge the effective reserve base. He sketches three routes — rules on intervention, a gold-for-SDR substitution account, a Witteveen-style cap — and dismisses “politically impossible” as a temporary condition of education, recalling that dollar devaluation was once unspeakable.

Nothing of what I have said is well thought out: I have spoken impromptu. But I think we must have the courage of saying foolish things because, eventually, out of foolish things, wise things may be distilled.

Markets coordinate activities that no participant—and no economist—can fully comprehend. In this Ludwig von Mises memorial lecture, Hayek makes that tension the basis of both his account of prices and his argument for scientific restraint. Prices allow producers to respond to circumstances they need not know directly; economic theory, he argues, can explain the resulting patterns without predicting particular outcomes. His recollections of Mises sharpen the distinction: intellectual gratitude does not prevent him from questioning his mentor’s rationalism and wholly a priori conception of economics. The lecture offers a compact route into the connection between Hayek’s defence of market coordination and his criticism of aggregate forecasting, showing why the information conveyed by particular prices cannot simply be replaced by a general price index.

Winning an election, Hayek argues, can be worse than losing it if victory brings no authority to change policy. In this 1978 letter to The Times, reproduced with editorial annotation in 2022, he reads Conservative divisions as a clash between candidates seeking seats and Margaret Thatcher seeking the public support needed for difficult decisions. His support is pointed rather than unconditional: he disclaims knowledge of her private intentions and acknowledges the electoral risk. The concrete issue is trade unions’ legal privileges, which he wants revoked through a mandate sought directly from workers rather than negotiations with union leaders. This brief intervention exposes the demanding distinction Hayek draws between securing office and earning permission to govern differently.

Economists devoted to efficiency, Kirzner observes, keep building theories in which genuine error cannot happen. This chapter—its title nodding to Hayek's 1937 essay on economics and knowledge—asks why, and why market theory cannot manage without it. He clears away the false admissions: Mises's poor marksman is not irrational but merely unskilled; Croce's "economic error" smuggles in value judgments; Stigler's economics of information turns ignorance into rational economizing; Leibenstein's X-inefficiency dissolves into a taste for leisure. The genuine article is different—not lacking information, but failing to notice what lies before one's very nose, the cheaper identical good passed by. Alertness cannot be a resource one chooses to acquire, since choosing it already presupposes it. On this hinge Kirzner rebuilds Jevons's Law of Indifference as the systematic discovery and correction of real error.

Scope for entrepreneurship, we have discovered, is present whenever error occurs.

Can democratic government and individual liberty come apart? In this 1978 letter to The Times, Hayek defends limited democracy as a means of protecting freedom and enabling peaceful changes of government, not as an overriding value in itself. His distinction becomes contentious when he invokes Salazar’s Portugal and Pinochet’s Chile as examples of liberty under authoritarian rule. The explanatory notes in this 2022 reprint challenge those comparisons with evidence of repression and contemporary objections. Read together, letter and apparatus expose a concrete tension: Hayek insists that democracy requires a prior tradition of the rule of law, yet his chosen counterexamples raise doubts about how he recognizes and measures freedom.