The archive.

Railroad share battles, the advertising war between Lestoil and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola against Pepsi, European cartel threats and compensations — business life, this essay argues, is a tissue of strategic situations that ordinary maximization cannot describe. Conceding that game theory stands as an autonomous branch of mathematics, Morgenstern presses the harder claim that economic reality is itself frequently a game: the moment a rival controls a decisive variable and reacts, the normal maximum assumptions fail. Walrasian equilibrium and the crossing of demand and supply curves become special constructions that hide number, timing, and coalition. His strongest preference is for cooperative n-person theory, which can model mergers, wage bargains, proxy fights, and above all 'Macht' — power that marginal-productivity theory has no place for. Where power exists, he concludes, the prevailing theory must give way.

Es gibt kein Geschäft ohne Geschäftsgeheimnis.

English translation: “There is no business without a business secret.”

When large firms can shape demand and prices, what becomes of the claim that market competition protects economic freedom? In this 1962 article, Hans Bayer argues that corporate concentration requires a different institutional response—not centralized direction, but a market economy deliberately shaped from below. His distinctive concern is that prohibiting cooperation may weaken the very firms needed to sustain competition. Textile-machinery producers combining complementary specializations and retailers pooling purchases show how coordination can preserve independent businesses rather than simply consolidate power. Bayer also gives workers and consumers a role in governing these arrangements. The article offers a concrete way to examine the boundary between cooperation that sustains economic plurality and concentration that undermines it.

Das große Unternehmen ist nicht dem „anonymen Prozeß“ unterworfen, sondern es kann von sich aus innerhalb gewisser Grenzen den Absatz bestimmen und einen „Markt machen“.

English translation: “The large enterprise is not subject to the “anonymous process”; rather, it can itself, within certain limits, determine sales and “make a market.”

Can a reviewer reject an economist’s politics without confronting his method? In this short comment on C. E. Ayres’s review of Ludwig von Mises’s Epistemological Problems of Economics, Rothbard argues that hostility to laissez-faire has displaced accurate exposition. He foregrounds Mises’s praxeology: deductive economic theory that, on this account, helps explain historical events but cannot be tested by them. Rothbard’s own radical laissez-faire commitments sharpen rather than conceal the stakes. He distinguishes professional consensus from proof, and criticism of the mixed economy from failure to recognize its existence. The exchange offers a concentrated view of how Rothbard links methodological defence to political dissent—and why he insists that explaining government intervention does not entail endorsing it.

Marxism promised socialism as the inevitable verdict of history, and in that promise Mises finds a secular eschatology—a faith that relieved believers of judgment while licensing intolerance toward dissenters. His 1962 address to a Young Americans for Freedom rally attacks scientific socialism as prophecy disguised as science, and tracks how collectivists captured the moral vocabulary, so that progress came to mean the road toward collectivism and reaction any defense of liberty. Against that regime of language he sets the appearance of anti-collectivist students: not mere campus politics but a sign that conformity has cracked and that individualism, constitutional government, and the rule of law can again be defended without apology. Freedom's return, he argues, is first intellectual and cultural—a matter of public conviction—before it can ever be institutional.

The spell of the dreadful conformity that threatened to convert our country into a spiritual desert is broken.

Ragnar Nurkse's path ran from Estonia through Edinburgh and Vienna to the League of Nations, Columbia, and an early death in 1959, and Haberler's introduction to his collected writings reads that path as a single sustained inquiry into international economic order. The apparently scattered concerns — capital movements, monetary equilibrium, balance-of-payments adjustment, balanced growth — cohere, he argues, because Nurkse joined rigorous theory to careful statistics without letting either dominate. Haberler traces the Viennese early work, shaped by Hayek and Mises, on capital flows arising when stages in the structure of production sit in different countries, through the League studies that produced the classic International Currency Experience, to the development essays. Crucially, he insists Nurkse drew no protectionist or central-planning moral from balanced growth.

There is no sense in committing suicide in order to avoid death.

Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State gives Mises the occasion for both an endorsement and an assault. He greets the treatise as a comprehensive restoration of economics as a science of human action—praxeology—that reconstructs prices, wages, profit, and loss from purposeful choice rather than collecting isolated policy doctrines. Much of the review champions Rothbard's attack on mathematical economics: equilibrium is a timeless hypothetical that describes no actual process, and numerical data are historical records, not measurable constants. On unemployment, Mises applauds the recovery of the wage rate as the missing price. He registers one reservation, over Rothbard's philosophy of law and punishment, but the verdict holds: an epochal contribution to praxeology, and a reminder that the organization of the economy is every citizen's concern rather than a specialist's preserve.

The issues of society's economic organization are every citizen's business.

Profit and loss enter the analysis where certainty ends. The second volume—continuing the German translation of Man, Economy, and State—moves from the static market into dynamic change, treating entrepreneurial profit as the reward for correctly appraising underpriced factors and loss as the penalty for error. From here Rothbard mounts his assault on rival doctrines: he denies that a monopoly price can be identified on an unhampered market, dismantles the Keynesian multiplier and consumption function, rejects Fisher's quantity equation and its 'price level' as pseudo-measurements, and defends 100 percent gold reserves against fractional-reserve banking, which he calls fraud. Unions, he argues, win restrictive wages for some only by forcing others into unemployment. Value, throughout, flows from consumer demand back to factor prices, never from cost forward to price.

Das Kapital erzeugt keinen Gewinn. Das tun nur kluge unternehmerische Entscheidungen.

English translation: “Capital does not generate profit. Only shrewd entrepreneurial decisions do.”

Can law developed by judges rather than legislators still enforce oppression? In this review of Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law, first published in 1962 and supplied here in its 1981 reprint, Murray N. Rothbard welcomes the challenge to legislative sovereignty but presses beyond institutional reform. Custom and decentralized courts, he argues, offer no guarantee that legal rules will protect liberty: inherited prohibitions on conspiracy and seditious libel expose the problem. His proposed alternative combines competing private judges with a fixed legal standard forbidding initiated violence against persons and property. The review makes visible a tension within libertarian legal thought: whether freedom rests on the process through which law emerges or on substantive principles that can condemn even established custom.

Mounting fear that the gold-exchange standard might buckle under an overhang of dollar claims frames this pedagogical survey of the leading blueprints for remaking the world's monetary order. Machlup sorts the proposals into five families—extending the gold-exchange standard, mutual central-bank assistance, centralized reserve creation, raising the price of gold, and freely flexible exchange rates—and weighs each against the charges of balance-of-payments strain, inadequate reserve growth, and fragility. He walks through the Keynes Clearing Union with its bancor, Triffin's plan to convert the IMF into a world central bank, and Maxwell Stamp's certificates for development aid, using balance-sheet T-accounts to separate genuine reserve creation from mere credit transfer. He declines to crown any single plan, offering analysis rather than verdict.

Gold and exchange reserves are needed only if exchange rates are not permitted to move to the level that would equilibrate the market at the moment.

A satellite can gather weather data and military intelligence with the same instruments: how, then, can states agree to separate peaceful exploration from strategic rivalry? In this 1962 essay from Space Flight Report to the Nation, Oskar Morgenstern tests hopes for international space cooperation against the demands of enforcement. He disputes the usefulness of Antarctica as a precedent and asks who could restrain the very powers capable of policing an agreement. His Cold War distrust of Soviet conduct shapes the argument, but its sharpest distinction is between technical capability and political authority: being able to destroy a satellite does not establish when doing so is justified. The essay offers a compact examination of how discovery unsettles sovereignty—and why scientific cooperation alone cannot supply workable political controls.

Morgenstern’s brief, signed preface places two advance chapters at a precise moment in the revision of On the Accuracy of Economic Observations: on July 9, 1962, he expected the rewritten second edition to reach the printer within weeks. Its interest is documentary rather than argumentative. Readers can establish the chapters’ relation to the larger book and trace the acknowledged contributions of Econometric Research Program collaborators and typist Lois A. Crooks. The preface records publication circumstances and working relationships, not a thesis about statistical accuracy.

A child masters the grammar of its language long before it could state a single rule of syntax — a fact Hayek takes as the key to human conduct at large. This British Academy lecture argues that we are governed everywhere by rules we can follow but cannot articulate: in craftsmanship and athletics, in the sense of justice, and above all in perception, where we read gestures, moods, and purposes without knowing the cues that guide us. Drawing the theory of classification from his Sensory Order into linguistics, ethology, and social-science method, he distinguishes patterns we can specify from those we intuitively recognize but never fully state, defending the latter as indispensable data for understanding action. The argument closes on a Gödelian limit: no mind can wholly specify the rules on which its own workings depend.

What we recognize as purposive conduct is conduct following a rule with which we are acquainted but which we need not explicitly know.