The archive.

Two opposed criticisms of capitalism meet a single answer in this Hillsdale College lecture: that capital requirements shield incumbents from entry, and that a competitive order could retain its virtues with the state as sole supplier of capital. Kirzner's wedge is the Misesian separation of entrepreneur from capitalist—pure entrepreneurial profit is arbitrage across markets and time, earned by perceiving opportunity, never by ownership as such. Entry is blocked, he argues, only where the needed resources are monopolistically withheld, not merely because a newcomer lacks funds; the cost of proving one's competence to lenders is a real social cost, not an imperfection. Against the Berle-Galbraith thesis, the corporation emerges as an unplanned device joining entrepreneurial talent to large capital without requiring managers to own it.

We conclude, then, not only that private ownership of capital is not inconsistent with the competitive market process, but that it is in fact essential to the efficiency of the competitive market process.

Drafted in August 1973 for the German Council of Economic Experts and printed unchanged as a Kiel lecture, this expert memorandum asks whether the dollar was truly undervalued against the floating currencies, above all the D-Mark. Machlup turns a policy question into a methodological one: once rates are set by markets, expectations, capital flows, and official intervention, terms like “undervaluation” and “equilibrium exchange rate” lose any firm meaning, and calling a free-market rate wrong is merely a forecast of future correction. He rejects purchasing-power parity for small index movements, denies any clean statistical split between short- and long-term capital, and names capital flows the strongest of all forces on the exchange market. No durable, correct external value of the dollar, he concludes, can be computed at all.

Die Behauptung, der Dollar sei über- oder unterbewertet, drückt immer ein Mißtrauensvotum aus.

English translation: “The assertion that the dollar is over- or undervalued always expresses a vote of no confidence.”

Against the postwar faith in fiscal fine-tuning, Haberler binds together three things usually treated separately: economic growth, monetary stability, and personal freedom. Growth matters, he argues, because it widens the practical range of human choice, but the institutions that generate it demand discipline rather than activist management. Severe depressions, he judges, have become largely avoidable, so the live danger is now creeping inflation, and here his reassessment of the Phillips curve does the analytical work. Phillips's own mechanism, he notes, was demand-pull, not cost-push; any apparent trade-off between inflation and unemployment holds only while rising prices go unanticipated, and dissolves once expectations catch up. Set within a classical-liberal frame that reaches from the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth to wage-push unionism, the book narrows what stabilization policy can honestly promise: no durable bargain between jobs and inflation exists.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that severe depressions are a thing of the past.

Labor-market statistics and the recognition of trade unions belong to the same scholarly portrait in Emil Kauder’s brief Neue Deutsche Biographie entry on Ignaz Jastrow. Kauder emphasizes how this historically trained economist joined empirical inquiry to social reform: measuring labor supply, demand, and food costs while seeking to place social policy within administrative science. His assessment gives particular interest to Jastrow’s unfinished project and identifies his economic reporting as a precursor of business-cycle reporting. Yet Kauder reserves his highest praise for Jastrow’s late world history. The entry offers a compact account of the practical commitments and historical breadth by which Kauder judges this scholar’s achievement.

A market transaction is not the transport of goods but the transfer of a title; free-market economists, Rothbard insists, therefore cannot defend voluntary exchange without also defending the justice of the ownership behind it. His 1974 essay presses this against the utilitarians Coase and Demsetz, whose deference to whatever government defines as property collapses, he argues, into legal positivism—ready to endorse arbitrary redistribution or even slavery so long as it is legal. Against them he builds a natural-rights theory from two principles: self-ownership of one's body, and the homesteading of unused nature through labor, from which exchange, wages, saving, and bequest follow. Applied to real titles it cuts both ways, condemning holdings rooted in conquest or state grant, as with coercive Latin American landlords, while validating many others—making it as anti-conservative as it is anti-socialist.

Whichever way he decides, the economist cannot escape a judgment, a theory of justice in the ownership of property.

One unfinished project links Keynes's Treatise on Money and his General Theory: the attempt to make economics adequate to a future no agent can know. Shackle finds the sharpest tool not in the General Theory but in the Treatise's Fundamental Equations, which he reads as rudimentary sequence analysis—income as anticipated cost, profit as the gap between what was expected and what occurred. From this ex ante/ex post distinction he rebuilds liquidity preference and the marginal efficiency of capital as phenomena of speculative markets, confidence, and mood, not as stable schedules. Economic life becomes kaleidic: neither a march toward equilibrium nor a regular cycle, but a succession of temporary patterns that shifting expectations can shatter in an instant, leaving resources idle as asset-holders retreat into liquidity.

Income, in the Fundamental Equations, is a conjecture which can be wrong.

The rioting and near civil war in Northern Ireland gives Rothbard the occasion to argue that anti-statism need not mean indifference to peoples under occupation. Libertarians who scorn national liberation as merely the manufacture of new nation-states become, he warns, the objective defenders of today's bloated empires—as the Russian anarchists did in 1918 when they opposed Ukrainian and White Russian independence. His decisive distinction separates aggressive nationalism, which rationalizes conquest, from liberatory nationalism, which resists it, and he treats "collective security" as a swindle that sanctifies borders first drawn by aggression. Applying a property-and-aggression analysis to political geography, he proposes that the Catholic-majority districts of Northern Ireland—Western Derry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, southern Armagh and Down—revert to the South.

Nationalism is not a unitary, monolithic phenomenon. If it is aggressive, we should oppose it; if liberatory, we should favor it.

Writing after the 1973 oil embargo and OPEC's cartel price rise had transformed the monetary scene, Haberler sets out to calm the panic rather than amplify it. The oil shock, he grants, imposes a real transfer of purchasing power from the industrial world to the producers, but a large transfer is not an insoluble monetary crisis. Treated as a single bloc, the importing countries could bear it while output still expanded; the genuine difficulty is distributional, since exporters' spending and investment will not match each nation's oil bill, and exchange rates must apportion the adjustment. Because no authority can compute the correct new parities, floating is the least bad response to uncertainty. France's decision to let the franc float confirms the lesson, and he cautions Washington to welcome dollar appreciation rather than retaliate with tariffs or quotas.

If they keep their money in liquid form (fail to spend it), it is up to monetary management in the importing countries to neutralize a possible deflationary effect.

The moral claim that a person is entitled to what he has produced runs through traditions as opposed as Locke, Mill, Friedman, Marx, and J. B. Clark, yet all of them, Kirzner shows, quietly assume that production means output flowing from owned factors. On that reading pure entrepreneurship, which owns nothing at the outset, produces nothing and earns no ethical title to its gains. Against it he sets a second sense of production: the alert act by which someone perceives a possible plan and brings it into being. Re-reading Locke's labor theory, finders-keepers acquisition, and Samuelson's suspicion of speculative profit, he argues that the entrepreneur may be the producer in the ethically decisive sense. He offers no finished defense of capitalism, but clarifies the ground on which any such defense would have to stand.

The foundation of the whole is the right of producers to what they themselves have produced.

Accepting the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize amid accelerating inflation, Hayek turned the occasion into an indictment of his own discipline. Economists, he charges, have made policy blunders by aping the physical sciences, a scientistic reflex that mistakes measurability for importance and prefers elegant aggregates like total demand management to the dispersed, local knowledge through which markets actually coordinate. Borrowing Warren Weaver's distinction between organized and unorganized complexity, he argues that social phenomena permit only falsifiable pattern predictions, never precise forecasts, and that inflationary stimulus buys employment by drawing labour into uses sustainable only under continued expansion. The lecture closes on the market as a spontaneous communication system and on a plea for humility against the charlatanry of social engineering.

We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.

Money, capital, law, psychology, method: Machlup reads more than fifty years of Hayek’s writing as one sustained inquiry into how coordination arises under limited knowledge — an appraisal offered here in Kurt Leube and Alfred Bosch’s German translation of his 1974 English essay, expanded with a biography and Nobel materials. He joins Hayek’s early Austrian-Wicksellian cycle theory, in which credit expansion lengthens production beyond voluntary saving and forces malinvestment, to the neglected Pure Theory of Capital and its intertemporal equilibrium. He follows the path from the Misesian calculation debate to the deeper problem of dispersed knowledge, where prices coordinate by economizing on what no central planner could ever gather. Of all Hayek’s fields, Machlup ranks capital theory first.

Wenn ich das Fachgebiet auszuwählen hätte, auf dem Hayeks Beiträge am fundamentalsten und bahnbrechendsten waren, dann fiele meine Wahl auf die Kapitaltheorie.

English translation: “If I had to select the field in which Hayek's contributions have been most fundamental and pathbreaking, my choice would fall on capital theory.”

Liberty against Power, social power against state power, that antithesis drives this sweeping narrative history of colonial America, running from the first seventeenth-century settlements through the Revolution and the Articles of Confederation. Rothbard rejects class conflict as the engine of events, reserving it for cases where groups seize government privilege, and applies a Lockean test of legitimate ownership by labor and first use against feudal grants, quitrents, and mercantilist monopoly. Puritan theocracy, Bacon's Rebellion, the persecution of Quakers, the Dominion of New England, and the market forces that dissolved wage-and-price controls all become episodes in one drama. Detailed narrative, long abandoned by textbook surveys, is restored here as the very substance of history.

The cleansing acid of profit was to dissolve incipient feudalism and land monopoly.