The archive.

Champagne land commands high rents because consumers value champagne—not the other way round. This reversal anchors Rothbard’s dictionary article, presented here in its 2008 republication, on how productive resources acquire value. His Austrian perspective separates two questions easily conflated: why means derive their value from desired ends, and how actual prices for those means emerge. Against attempts to calculate factor values directly from subjective preferences, Rothbard stresses market exchange and entrepreneurial trial and error. The distinction gives this compact entry its bite: explaining the logical dependence of production on consumption does not, he argues, supply the knowledge needed for economic calculation. Readers can discover both the force of that distinction and a limiting case in which market participants must bargain over relative factor prices.

Keynesians, on Rothbard's account, have the whole causal story backward. They treat idle labor and unused capacity as brute aggregate facts, then insist inflation cannot revive while slack persists, yet stagflation and the renewed inflation of later years refuted them. The missing piece, he argues, is the price system. Unemployment is a surplus like any other: resources go unused because their owners hold out for wages or prices above what buyers will pay, which makes idleness, in an analytical sense, voluntary. Drawing on William H. Hutt, he traces persistent mass unemployment to interventions, compulsory unionism, minimum-wage laws, welfare, and unemployment insurance, that keep wages above market-clearing levels. Monetary expansion can mobilize idle resources only by raising the returns paid for them, which is to say only through inflation. Idle capacity and rising prices, then, are no paradox at all.

The Keynesians themselves create the problem by leaving out the price system.

Development is ordinary economics practised under difficult conditions, not a separate discipline licensing illiberal policy. From that premise Haberler, writing as a trade theorist, prosecutes the anti-market doctrines that captured the postwar field: import substitution, exchange control, the big push, and chronic trade pessimism. He traces their appeal to a fatal misreading of the Great Depression, which he insists was a monetary catastrophe rather than proof of capitalist stagnation, and to an aggregation that lumped unlike countries together. The Prebisch-Singer terms-of-trade thesis he rejects with Lipsey's evidence; the demonstration effect he calls patronizing; disguised unemployment he answers with Viner and Schultz. His comparisons, West Germany against East, South Korea against North, Taiwan against China, turn the chapter into a broad indictment of planning, defending monoeconomics throughout.

The best policy would be to let free markets, in other words, capitalism, do what they do best – develop new industries.

How can individual valuations explain money, economic crises, and the limits of central planning? In this New Palgrave dictionary entry, republished in 2008, Murray N. Rothbard presents Ludwig von Mises’s economics as a connected response to that question. Money poses a particularly revealing puzzle: people value it for its purchasing power, yet purchasing power itself depends on their demand. Rothbard’s account of Mises’s solution opens onto a broader contrast between causal explanations grounded in human action and mathematical descriptions of equilibrium. Writing sympathetically from within the Austrian tradition, Rothbard treats Mises’s defence of laissez-faire as a consequence of his economic reasoning. The result is a compact intellectual portrait that shows how monetary theory, economic calculation, and deductive method fit together in Rothbard’s interpretation of Mises.

Where does a beginning begin? Voegelin's posthumous and unfinished fifth volume of Order and History — presented here in the German translation of the 1987 English original — opens with the paradox that a first sentence becomes a true beginning only once the whole has reached its end. From this he unfolds his late account of consciousness as both intentional, directed toward things, and luminous, an event within the encompassing reality it seeks; the human site of participation is Plato's metaxy. Reading Genesis 1, Hesiod's Mnemosyne, and Plato's Timaeus, he sets reflective distance against Hegel's reflective identity, diagnosing German idealism's system as an imaginative forgetting of existence in tension toward the Beyond. Order, he insists, is never possessed as doctrine but sustained as existential balance within an unfinished search.

Es gibt keine autonome, nicht-paradoxe Sprache, die als Zeichensystem bereitliegt, um vom Menschen benutzt zu werden, wenn er sich auf die paradoxen Strukturen von Realität und Bewußtsein beziehen will.

English translation: “There is no autonomous, non-paradoxical language ready at hand as a system of signs to be used by man when he wishes to refer to the paradoxical structures of reality and consciousness.”

A crime without a victim is how Rothbard characterizes insider trading, and from that provocation he builds a full libertarian defense of profiting from superior knowledge. The 1980s prosecutions of Wall Street financiers, he argues, are not justice but a punitive political campaign that treats speculators as worse than robbers while harming no one who was not already willing to sell. Trading on early information, in his account, is entrepreneurship: it moves capital toward the farsighted and improves the whole economic system. He reads the charge of unfairness as egalitarian resentment of any human superiority, warns that such enforcement chills speech and privacy, and contends that federal attacks on takeover financiers like Drexel Burnham Lambert shield old-line managerial elites against stockholders and market competition.

There is a veritable Reign of Terror rampant in the United States—and everyone’s cheering.

With the 1871 publication of Carl Menger's Grundsätze, a distinctive way of doing economics was born—subjectivist, causal-genetic, and pointedly non-mathematical, its concept of the margin embedded in choice and time rather than in the equilibria of Jevons and Walras. Kirzner's survey follows the school from the Methodenstreit against the German Historical School through Böhm-Bawerk's capital theory and anti-Marxist critique, Wieser's opportunity cost, and the interwar Vienna of Mises's private seminar, to the near-fatal absorption of Austrian ideas into mainstream equilibrium theory. The socialist calculation debate, he argues, exposed what survived: markets understood as processes of discovery under dispersed knowledge. A closing taxonomy sorts the rival senses of 'Austrian economics'—a historical episode, a capital tradition, a political label, the Menger-Mises-Hayek revival, the radical subjectivism of Lachmann—and shows why the tradition is none of them alone.

The Austrians made no attempt to present their ideas in mathematical form, and as a consequence the Austrian concept of the margin differs somewhat from that of Jevons and Walras.

That an administration responsible for the largest deficits in American history should offer a constitutional balanced-budget amendment as the cure strikes Rothbard as image triumphing over substance. The amendment, he argues, would balance only projected budgets, never actual year-end spending, and would fall to accounting tricks, off-budget expenditures, and revenue limits pegged to national income, which he dismisses as a statistical artifact, not a real entity fit for fundamental law. Proposals to exempt government capital spending would simply relabel boondoggles as investment. Since the federal courts that would enforce it are themselves organs of the government being restrained, enforcement is a fiction. He likens the whole scheme to the supply-siders' phony gold standard: the rhetoric of discipline masking undiminished cheap money and deficit politics.

Second, balancing the budget by increasing taxes is like curing influenza by shooting the patient; the cure is worse than the disease.

"The consequences of human action, not human design"—the Ferguson-via-Hayek slogan that casts Austrian economics as the study of unintended outcomes—gets a pointed rebuttal here. Rothbard grants that the market coordinates beyond any single benevolent intention, as with Smith's butcher and baker, but insists the formula collapses once intention is taken seriously: if businessmen learn sound theory and consciously aim at serving consumers, the once-unintended becomes intended. Grounding his case in Misesian praxeology, he treats human action as purposive choice rather than blind response to stimuli. The stakes are political as well as methodological: to describe the growth of the state as nobody's design, he warns, is to disguise the special interests that consciously pursue privilege behind the rhetoric of the public good.

For if actions are largely always unintended, this means that government just grew like Topsy, and that no person or group ever willed the pernicious consequences of that growth.

Redistribution is not charity but coercion - so runs the moral axis of this compact essay, which defines entitlement programs as the state taking wealth from some citizens to hand it to others. Sennholz insists on a sharp line between the Good Samaritan, who gives his own property, and the welfare state, which commands the property of others. What egalitarians imagine as idle surplus, he argues, is mostly productive capital, so seizing and consuming it in the name of compassion weakens the very order the poor depend on. He rejects the Pigovian welfare-economics claim that transfers maximize total satisfaction, since utilities cannot be compared across persons, and defines justice as proportional reward rather than enforced sameness. Its blunt conclusion: the true beneficiary of redistribution is not the needy but government itself.

To be a helper in need is to lend a friendly hand to a needy person; it is personal effort and sacrifice.

Millions of tax dollars, mobilized by a propaganda campaign that has suddenly discovered the homeless: this is the spectacle Rothbard sets out to deflate. He argues that "the homeless" and "the hungry" are political labels manufactured in sequence, fracturing a single condition, poverty or lack of money, into discrete emergencies. The fragmentation is not innocent: separate needs create separate constituencies, funneling subsidies to construction firms, agriculture, food distributors, and the social-work bureaucracies that administer them. Concrete images of need, he notes, dramatize far better than cash income. Turning from rhetoric to incentives, he presses the uncomfortable questions the welfare framing avoids: why people lack money, and how permanent public aid erodes work effort, rehabilitation, and private charity.

Money does not have nearly the sentimental value of home and hearth and Christmas dinner.

Wide swings in the dollar and mounting protectionist pressure had, by the mid-1980s, revived the dream of governments steering exchange rates by agreement - a dream Haberler treats as more dangerous than the volatility it means to cure. The American trade deficit, he insists, is the counterpart of capital inflows financing federal borrowing when domestic saving falls short, not the product of foreign refusal to expand; the cure lies at home. Using an asset-market approach, he reads the Plaza Agreement and Baker-era activism as politicization of expectations rather than technical correction, since sterilized intervention moves rates only when it signals durable policy change. He rejects a return to fixed parities, target zones, and Group of Seven fine-tuning alike, holding that markets, though they err, err less persistently than politically committed states.

Inflation forced floating on reluctant policy-makers.