2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Beginning from the premise that money emerged from barter rather than state decree, this treatise builds a full Austrian theory of money and then turns it against the banks. Rothbard separates honest loan banking, which lends real savings, from deposit banking that issues more warehouse receipts than it holds gold, fractional reserves he treats as inherently fraudulent, inflationary, and structurally bankrupt. Free banking, he argues, restrains such expansion through redemption by rival banks; central banking exists precisely to remove that limit, monopolizing note issue and pyramiding credit through open-market operations. Tracing the story from the 1694 Bank of England to the Federal Reserve, and debating Lawrence White over Scottish free banking, he closes with a demand for 100 percent gold reserves.
Inflation is a process of subtle expropriation, where the victims understand that prices have gone up but not why this has happened.
When Hume insisted that the rules of morality are not the work of reason, he supplied the thread Hayek follows through this 1983 plenary lecture, delivered at Chicago's conference on the unity of the sciences. Traditional morality, Hayek argues, is not a set of values that science can rationally construct but an inherited condition for the survival of modern humanity, the product of cultural evolution and group selection rather than design. Tracing the idea from Mandeville and the Scottish moralists to Darwin, he defends private property, the family, and religious sanction as unplanned restraints that made the extended order possible, and he indicts the rationalist line from Descartes to Marx and Keynes for treating such traditions as irrational. Socialism, he concludes, is the fatal conceit of an intelligentsia that trusts only what it can prove.
If you want to test this assertion, try to find a positivist who is not a socialist.
Handed ten stock objections to capitalism by a young defender of free enterprise, Hazlitt answers each in turn in this 1983 reply—on resource depletion, monopoly and discriminatory pricing, corporate power, access to capital, workplace injury, unequal wages and housing, and the charge that the system is simply inhuman. His recurring move is to accept the factual complaint while denying the inference: scarcity, error, and self-interest exist under every order, and government coercion usually worsens what it means to repair. Comparison, not utopia, is his standard—capitalism judged against feasible socialism, not against imagined abundance and perfect virtue. The title's diagnosis comes last: Americans live not under real capitalism but under what Mises called "sabotaged" capitalism, whose interventions breed unemployment and shortages that are then blamed on the market, generating demands for still more intervention.
The number of faults that have been alleged against capitalism are without limit.
Every generation of economists, Rothbard notes, hunts for the next culminating doctrine after Keynes, and in the late 1970s supply-side economics seemed to furnish it, though without a systematic treatise, a single major theorist, or real doctrinal unity. This polemic grants the movement its one valid point, that lower marginal tax rates can spur work, saving, and investment, then attacks the fiscal myth grafted onto it: the Laffer Curve promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves and erase deficits with no confrontation over government spending. Supply-siders, he argues, are closer to Keynesians than they admit, tolerating deficits and cheap money while dressing managed currency in gold symbolism. Through Jude Wanniski's populism he exposes a doctrine that flatters voters by promising mutually inconsistent goods at once.
For the “gold standard” they want provides only the illusion of a gold standard without the substance.
Watch how a spending increase becomes a "cut." Rothbard dissects the vocabulary by which federal economists redescribe fiscal expansion as restraint: budget "cuts" that merely fall below a projected increase, tax "cuts" offset by Social Security hikes and inflation-driven bracket creep, tax increases rebranded as "revenue enhancement," and exemptions recast as "loopholes." He borrows Mises's observation that the very word "loophole" presumes the government rightfully owns all you earn. The pattern, he insists, is never neutral: by swapping observable dollars for baselines and counterfactuals, the state claims austerity while it grows. His most pointed case is the redefinition of the deficit as an inflation-adjusted "real increase" in debt, a maneuver he likens to apologetics for Germany's 1923 hyperinflation, and the shrinking of "down payment" to a hoped-for slowing of future borrowing.
Now we have "budget cuts" which are not cuts, but rather substantial increases over the previous year's expenditures.
Returning to the terrain of his London lectures on Prices and Production, Hayek recasts production as a flow through time, a stream in which resources are allocated not only horizontally among goods but longitudinally among stages serving different future dates. Competitive relative prices supply the signals that keep this changing capital structure coordinated, work that no central planner, lacking the dispersed local knowledge, could perform. Against Keynes he insists that demand for commodities is not demand for labour, and that macroeconomics obscures the relative-price adjustments governing capital, wages, and intermediate goods. Disequilibrium, he argues, is not a flaw but the very thing that keeps the stream moving; price fixing, monopolistic wage-setting, and the craving for security only dam it. The remedy lies not in demand management but in better legal and monetary rules.
Genaugenommen kann eigentlich ein Strom niemals im Gleichgewicht sein, denn gerade das Ungleichgewicht hält ihn in Fluß und bestimmt seine Richtung.
English translation: “Strictly speaking, a stream can never really be in equilibrium, for it is precisely the disequilibrium that keeps it flowing and determines its direction.”
Planning fails, on the usual telling, because information is expensive to gather. Kirzner's target here is exactly that comfortable assumption. Hayek's knowledge problem, he argues, cannot be folded into standard welfare economics as a matter of higher search costs, because the ignorance that matters most is ignorance the planner does not know he suffers. Beginning from the Robbinsian model of the individual optimizing over given ends and means, he shows that a preliminary search plan cannot rescue it: search itself presupposes knowing what is missing and where to look. Scaled up to a central authority governing dispersed, locally held knowledge, the difficulty becomes crippling, and no allocation calculus can absorb unknown ignorance. What markets possess and planners cannot replicate is entrepreneurial alertness to the profit opportunities that disequilibrium prices throw off. The argument reaches industrial policy and piecemeal intervention alike.
The unknown ignorance that is the heart of the knowledge problem created by the dispersal of information defies its being able to be squeezed into the Procrustean bed of the allocation plan.
The alternatives among which a person chooses are creations of his own thought, not a menu the world hands down — and from that premise Shackle builds this compact statement of subjectivist economics, written to introduce Alexander Shand's survey of the tradition from Plato to Hayek. Choice becomes creative rather than calculative, its consequences unknowable in advance, so that the future is not merely unknown but partly made. Non-determinism and the unpredictability of history-to-come follow, along with a political corollary: central coercion cannot render human affairs predictable, only extinguish the dispersed invention that renews economic life. Markets earn their place by disseminating knowledge after events occur, never by abolishing uncertainty.
Subjectivism credits the individual with the power of the alchemist who can throw into his crucible whatever his fancy has invented but knows not what will emerge.
Expensive to create, verify, and teach yet nearly free to reuse, knowledge resists efficient pricing—a tension that runs through this survey of information economics and human capital. Writing deliberately without a line of algebra, Machlup guides the reader through markets riddled with asymmetric information, from Akerlof's lemons to adverse selection and moral hazard, through public goods and the free-rider problem, and back to the Mises-Hayek socialist calculation debate and the dispersed knowledge that no central board can gather. He accepts a weak rational expectations while rejecting the strong version as granting agents superhuman powers, and narrows human capital to investments built into persons alone, distinct from tools and disembodied knowledge. The third volume of the Knowledge project, published after his death, completes it.
I have set for myself the task of writing without a single line of algebra, even where this constraint should make it impossible to give a proper presentation of an author’s ideas.
A traffic signal regulates an intersection two ways: by being perfectly timed already, or by being faulty in a manner that feeds back and corrects itself — and that analogy carries the argument here. Economists, Kirzner charges, have flattened Hayek's insight into a single claim, that equilibrium prices efficiently summarize dispersed knowledge, as in the textbook tin example. The deeper, more Austrian truth concerns disequilibrium prices: the wrong prices, the missed trades, the disappointment and regret of a tea market where beneficial exchanges go unmade. Such prices coordinate not by telling the truth but by exposing error, alerting entrepreneurs to arbitrage and profit. Faulting even Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions for the usual emphasis, Kirzner concludes that the market's deepest service is not to broadcast what is already known but to generate the conditions under which the unknown is progressively uncovered — which is why price controls do such damage.
What Hayek's 'Austrian' insights permit us to see is that the social function served by market prices is captured far more significantly by the concept of discovery than by that of communication.
Separate money creation from saving, real resources from accounting totals, causal theory from statistical coincidence: the same analytic move recurs through the ten refutations Rothbard assembles in this compact 1984 brief against the language of macroeconomic management. Deficits, he argues, are inflationary only when financed through the banking system; falling prices are the mark of dynamic growth, not catastrophe; wage rates track productivity, not tariff walls. He punctures the Phillips curve as an ideological fallback and the Laffer curve for making state revenue the measure of policy, asking why maximizing government receipts should be anyone's aim at all. The only sound cure for deficits, he concludes, is the one no politician will name: cut the federal budget.
People are contrary cusses whose behavior, thank goodness, cannot be forecast precisely in advance.
What if the Federal Reserve’s early record is measured against bankers’ interests rather than its public promises of stability? In this essay, Rothbard interprets central banking as a means of coordinating credit expansion that competition and demands for redemption would otherwise constrain. His distinctive approach connects monetary mechanisms with banking alliances, political negotiations, and the influence of Benjamin Strong at the New York Fed. The argument becomes especially concrete in his account of Federal Reserve support for bankers’ acceptances and for Britain’s return to gold at sterling’s prewar parity. Readers can examine how reserve provision, securities purchases, and international cooperation worked—and assess Rothbard’s contention that the resulting instability arose from protected credit expansion, not merely from failures to manage it effectively.