1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The misery of English factory hands, the gluts of 1818 and 1826, and the depopulation of the countryside posed a puzzle Sismondi could not leave to sentiment: why did the liberal market and its machinery breed crises, unemployment, and want? This second volume presents his 1819 Nouveaux Principes as a dynamic and welfare economics set against the static equilibrium of his earlier work—and against Say's law and Ricardo, who conflated income with capital and imagined consumption almost limitless. Amonn follows Sismondi's demand that production stay proportioned to income and effective demand, his critique of Ricardian rent, his defense of small proprietorship, and his call to bind employers to their workers in sickness, age, and unemployment. Throughout, the editor marks the circular-flow insight as Sismondi's real advance while faulting the confusions that blur it.
Die statische Theorie oder Gleichgewichtstheorie stimmt nicht für die tatsächliche Entwicklung der Wirtschaft.
English translation: “The static theory, or equilibrium theory, does not accord with the actual development of the economy.”
When the textbooks of Hansen and Schneider reduced the quantity theory of money to the crude claim that prices simply track the money stock, Amonn set out to show they were attacking a straw man no serious theorist had ever held. Tracing the doctrine from Bodin and Hume through Mill and Fisher, he recasts it not as a mechanistic identity but as the application of ordinary supply-and-demand value theory to the special case of money, whose demand and supply enter as simple quantities rather than price-quantity functions. He defends Fisher's equation of exchange against the charge of empty tautology, distinguishes the money actually offered on the market from the total stock, and closes by likening the quantity-theory law to the law of free fall: never perfectly realized, yet valid when other factors are accounted for.
Man wird selbst in der ältesten geldtheoretischen Literatur vergeblich nach einer derart primitiven Fassung der Quantitätstheorie suchen.
English translation: “Even in the oldest monetary-theoretical literature one will search in vain for so primitive a formulation of the quantity theory.”
No final classification of taxes is possible, Amonn concedes at the outset, because real tax systems are the residue of historically uneven practice. What follows is a concise study aid to the special theory of taxation, tracing each levy—land, building, trade, capital-rent, labour, income, wealth, inheritance, consumption, and turnover taxes—through its object, assessment base, and above all its Überwälzung, the shifting and incidence that determine who truly bears the burden. He distinguishes objective yield taxes from the subjective income tax geared to ability to pay, judges the old yield taxes fit as principal taxes only in economically backward countries, and extends the analysis to public credit, the structure and conversion of state debt, and the fiscal equalization between a federation and its member states.
Eine Zwangsanleihe vereinigt die Nachteile sowohl einer Anleihe wie einer Steuer, ohne die Vorteile einer Anleihe bzw. die Vorteile einer Steuer zu bieten.
English translation: “A forced loan combines the disadvantages of both a loan and a tax without offering the advantages of either a loan or a tax.”
Across every front of postwar economic policy—money, cartels, rents, agriculture, public finance—Amonn diagnoses the same disorder: isolated, "pointillist" interventions that each summon the next until a market order slides toward central planning. Invoking Eucken's interdependence of orders, he shows how cheap money invites credit expansion, inflation, and then price controls. He reads the 1957 Law Against Restraints of Competition as a prohibition so laced with exceptions that it becomes abuse-control by another name, defends rent decontrol against entrenched tenant privilege, attacks cost-covering agricultural prices, and rejects Keynesian deficit finance and redistributive taxation alike. His guiding maxim, aligned with Erhard's "prosperity for all," is in dubio pro libertate—when in doubt, decide for freedom.
Will man den einkommenschwachen Schichten, die es nötig haben, helfen, so kann dies — und soll dies — durch sozialpolitische Maßnahmen geschehen, wie es bis anhin als Regel gegolten hat. Das ist etwas wesentlich anderes als die Umverteilung der Einkommen.
English translation: “If one wishes to help the low-income strata who are in need, this can — and should — be done through social-policy measures, as has hitherto been the rule. That is something essentially different from the redistribution of incomes.”
Switzerland, Amonn argues, has accumulated so many collectivist interventions that it can no longer honestly be called a market economy, whatever its constitution's guarantees of commercial freedom. Dedicated to Fritz Marbach, this critical survey turns a sharp eye on Swiss cartels, on the milk regime whose guaranteed prices breed gluts, on cost-covering agricultural prices that capitalize into ever-rising land values, and above all on wartime rent control, which he indicts at length for freezing the housing market, privileging sitting tenants over young families, and letting the building stock decay. He leans on the Federal Price Formation Commission's report and its standard of "possible competition," traces recent price rises to imported inflation, and warns that permanent rent control amounts, in Otto Bauer's own terms, to socialization by other means.
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.”