The archive.

A concertgoer and a solitary Crusoe both belong within economics as Rothbard understands it: neither money-making nor exchange defines its limits. In this short review of Israel Kirzner’s The Economic Point of View, republished in 2016 as Israel Kirzner and the Economic Man, Rothbard uses Kirzner’s history to defend Mises’s science of purposeful action. His central tension is how economics can remain value-free while qualifying as a “moral science.” The answer turns on distinguishing the analysis of means and ends from prescribing what those ends should be. Readers encounter both a pointed challenge to the caricature of “economic man” and Rothbard’s explicitly polemical claim that deductive economics, unlike behavioral social science, respects individual purpose and freedom.

Calling economic improvement “growth” can make it sound as automatic as a child gaining weight. In this essay, Mises argues that the metaphor conceals the saving, investment, and decisions about capital use on which higher living standards depend. His Austrian account of capital gives concrete force to two questions: can measured productivity gains be attributed wholly to labor, and does a poorer country’s faster percentage expansion demonstrate economic superiority? His answers challenge both wage-bargaining practices and Soviet–Western comparisons. The essay offers a pointed distinction between aggregate expansion and improved material provision, while exposing Mises’s broader political contention that governments promise growth through policies that obstruct its capital-forming conditions.

Cheap housing, guaranteed employment, higher wages: who pays when policy promises to make these benefits affordable? In this 1961 article, Richard Kerschagl compares market and command economies by tracing costs that neither institutional system can abolish. His defence of competitive prices and capital maintenance is qualified by recognition of neglected social needs, concentrated economic power, and the political necessity of employment. He also challenges market advocates who demand protection or subsidies for themselves. The article’s distinctive tension lies between social obligations and his insistence that lasting improvements depend on productive performance. Readers can examine how a benefit received as a worker or tenant may return as a burden on the same person as consumer, taxpayer, or saver—and why economic labels alone cannot settle policy choices.

Economics grew out of philosophy and never fully left it, and Amonn sets out to reconnect the two. A sweeping historical survey runs from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas, Locke, Hume, Quesnay, and Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, tracing how thinkers treated wealth, the just price, and usury under ethical norms before economics became an autonomous, quasi-natural science. From there he builds toward the socialist calculation problem—collectivist planning, lacking freely formed scarcity prices, has no reliable Knappheitsanzeiger—and toward the discipline's foundations in psychology, ethics, and the Methodenstreit over induction and deduction. The closing chapters weigh justice against expediency across property, inheritance, monopoly, taxation, and interest, which he defends through time-preference against the old Aristotelian and canon-law charge that money is barren.

Der Eigennutz im Wirtschaftsverkehr ist also keineswegs ein ethisch verwerfliches Prinzip.

English translation: “Self-interest in economic intercourse is thus by no means an ethically reprehensible principle.”

Equality before the law is one thing; equality of natural endowment quite another—and Mises devotes this seven-part essay to keeping the two from being confused. Human capacities are demonstrably unequal; the question is what a social order does with that fact. Status societies of lords, serfs, and slaves let the abler dominate, whereas capitalism compels them to serve, channeling superior talent into satisfying mass consumers who remain, in the market, always right. Representative government he reads as the political counterpart of consumer sovereignty, and socialism as its reversal—a subjection of the many to the few dressed in democratic language. Along the way he punctures the paternalism of the advertising critics, the faith that mass schooling can erase inborn difference, and the progressive businessman who imagines a secure post under the planners, closing not in fatalism but in warning.

It proclaimed that all men are born equal in rights and that this equality cannot be abrogated by any man-made law, that it is inalienable or, more precisely, imprescriptible.

A low-interest development loan may be expensive; a rigorously supervised one may be impossible to repay. In this 1961 article, Richard Kerschagl compares Eastern and Western financing by looking beyond stated credit terms to equipment prices, commodity deliveries, export markets, and political leverage. He argues that Soviet-bloc credits can conceal costs in tied transactions, while Western lenders too often demand hard-currency repayment without securing borrowers’ opportunities to earn it. His distinctive concern is the connection between financial obligations and actual flows of goods. That perspective also unsettles the equation of development with industrialization: agricultural improvements or transport may serve a country better than prestigious factories. Readers gain concrete criteria for judging aid by its effective costs, local suitability, and repayment prospects rather than its advertised generosity.

For nearly three millennia silver was the money metal of antiquity and the Middle Ages, beside which gold played a modest part; this volume in the series Die metallischen Rohstoffe follows its descent from coinage into the smelter. Kerschagl moves from the chalcophile geology of galena and the Comstock Lode through amalgamation, cupellation, and cyanide leaching to the monetary drama: shifting gold-silver ratios, the Latin Monetary Union's retreat from true bimetallism, and the doomed remonetization schemes of the interwar years. He argues that no one can fix an objective silver price, that most output now comes as a by-product of lead, zinc, and copper mining, and that only twentieth-century industrial demand, not monetary nostalgia, at last stabilized the metal.

Das Silber ist vorläufig in geordnete industrielle Bahnen hinübergelenkt worden und seine monetäre Wiederverwendung weder ein echtes noch auch nur ein sinnvolles Problem mehr.

English translation: “Silver has for the time being been diverted into orderly industrial channels, and its monetary reuse is no longer a genuine or even a meaningful problem.”

Animosity against business runs through the policies of every not-quite-socialist nation, and this 1961 Mont Pelerin Society paper sets out to expose it as intellectually confused. Firms grow large, Mises argues, not by decree but by serving mass demand better than rivals under the discipline of profit and loss; the moral center of the market is therefore consumer sovereignty, not the entrepreneur's dignity. He punctures the sentimental war between plucky small business and predatory bigness—small firms are typically interwoven with large-scale production—and warns that measures to shield small producers and family farms turn their beneficiaries into wards of the administration. Tracing nationalization's retreat into planning, from wartime Zwangswirtschaft to the soziale Marktwirtschaft, he closes on a democratic paradox: as consumers people build great enterprises, yet as voters they punish them.

The "common man" enjoys in the capitalistic countries amenities of which the richest people of ages gone by did not even dream.

What would governments lose if they stopped collecting economic statistics? In this short 1961 essay, supplied in its 2011 republication, Murray N. Rothbard answers from a libertarian perspective: not merely information, but a principal means of intervention. His target is both the reporting burden imposed on businesses—especially small firms—and the aggregate knowledge that makes industries and populations available for regulation. He contrasts officials’ reliance on statistics with the practical knowledge consumers and entrepreneurs acquire through prices, contacts, and experience. The essay’s provocation lies in its proposed remedy: abolishing government statistics to obstruct economic planning. It gives readers a concrete argument to test about the boundary between information as a useful public resource and information as an instrument of power.

Statistics are the eyes and ears of the bureaucrat, the politician, the socialistic reformer.

A generation of development economists held that primary-product exporters face an inexorable secular decline in their terms of trade, and thus a standing case for protection and industrialization. Haberler subjects that thesis to sustained scrutiny and finds it wanting: the historical evidence is thin, neglects quality improvements, new manufactured goods, and freight costs, and confuses a fall in commodity prices with a fall in welfare. Distinguishing commodity from single factorial terms of trade, he shows that cheaper exports need not mean loss where export productivity has risen, and he treats the cyclical instability of raw-material prices as real but exaggerated by the freak experience of the 1930s. His remedy is not buffer stocks and commodity agreements but financial discipline—reserves accumulated in booms and drawn down in slumps.

It is well known that the hypothesis under consideration is based entirely on the annual index of the United Kingdom's commodity terms of trade.

Planning becomes meaningful only when it openly ranks competing ends: growth against present consumption, employment against future surplus, equality against efficiency. Rosenstein-Rodan reads India's Five Year Plans less as a statistical exercise than as a theory of democratic development under scarcity, in which a poor society must decide how much the present generation may be asked to forgo for the sake of the future. He treats unemployment and the rural-urban divide as central inequalities rather than side effects, defends general education as social overhead capital whose returns are delayed but transformative, and argues that industrial concentration, often unavoidable where capital and markets are thin, must be restrained by taxation and public investment rather than by price controls. A socialist pattern, on his account, cannot mean redistribution alone, nor can development mean growth alone.

A series of choices between eating ('somewhat' or 'much') less today for the sake of eating ('somewhat' or 'much') more tomorrow has to be made.

National-income statistics fold government spending into "national product" as if a dollar taxed and spent were a dollar of output that consumers had chosen—and that sleight of hand is Rothbard's target. Market productivity, he argues, is validated only by voluntary purchase under scarcity; a million unwanted buggies are not "product" in the sense that chosen automobiles are. Government, funded by coercive confiscation and measured merely by its expenditures, cannot be run like a business and feeds parasitically on the private economy. He proposes subtracting state outlays from national product rather than adding them, answers Galbraith's complaint that public wants are starved by noting that the failing schools and streets cited already lie under government control, and rejects external-benefit defenses of public provision.

But in the public sector, the government's "productivity" is measured—mirabile dictu—by how much it spends!