The archive.

Can interest persist in an economy where innovation has ceased—and can it disappear even where capital remains productive? Alfred Amonn’s 1953 article challenges the assumptions behind both questions by distinguishing physical capital goods from present command over them. Against Keynes’s exclusively monetary explanation, he argues that scarce access to goods underlies interest, while money and liquidity preference help determine its rate. His extended example of fishermen acquiring boats and nets makes the distinction concrete: replacement costs, entrepreneurial profit and pure interest need not rise or vanish together. Readers can discover why productivity alone does not explain a positive return, why stationary conditions need not eliminate it, and how monetary and real explanations can be combined without treating either as sufficient.

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.”

A large, rent-controlled apartment can cost less than a smaller new one: for Alfred Amonn, this disparity helps explain why housing shortages persist even when construction resumes. His 1953 article on Swiss housing argues that frozen rents discourage shrinking households from moving, protecting established tenants while leaving newcomers to bear higher costs. Yet he separates rent reform from the removal of security of tenure: insufficient vacancies still justify protection against termination. This distinction gives his case for market restoration its particular shape—gradual rent increases, continued supervision, and assistance directed towards need rather than possession of a controlled tenancy. Readers can examine a concrete tension between protecting current occupants and making fuller use of scarce housing, without treating all emergency safeguards as equally necessary or equally obsolete.

Can international institutions secure cooperation when national economies are organized to obstruct it? In this 1955 review of the revised second edition of Wilhelm Röpke’s Internationale Ordnung – heute, Alfred Amonn endorses an answer that shifts attention from treaties and agencies to domestic economic and moral foundations. Competitive markets, convertible money, and limits on governmental economic power become, in his account of Röpke, conditions of international order rather than merely national policy choices. Exchange controls and persistent foreign-exchange shortages provide concrete tests of that position. Amonn’s unusually emphatic approval makes the review revealing in its own right: readers can examine how a diagnosis of monetary disorder becomes an argument against national planning, and where exposition turns into advocacy for Röpke’s liberal programme.

Building more homes does not necessarily put families into dwellings they need and can afford. In this 1955 review essay, Alfred Amonn examines eight reports from West Germany’s housing advisory council with Swiss policy firmly in view. He finds a compelling distinction between financing construction and helping households pay rent: protecting all existing tenants through frozen rents can discourage mobility and maintenance while leaving overcrowded families without relief. His support for cost-covering rents therefore goes together with targeted assistance, not the withdrawal of social protection. Particularly revealing is his attention to indirect effects—smaller new dwellings may free larger homes for families, while cheaper credit can complicate funded welfare provision. The essay offers a concrete examination of why housing finance, household needs, and social assistance must be considered together.

An economy can expand without changing how it produces or improving output per person. For Alfred Amonn, this distinction exposes a central weakness in dynamic equilibrium theory: explaining growth is not yet explaining development. In this 1956 review essay on Willy Kraus’s Wirtschaftswachstum und Gleichgewicht, Amonn tests models of expansion against the harder questions of technical change, capital deepening, and structural transformation. His criticism also separates equilibrium from two conditions often associated with it—steady growth and full employment. Readers can discover how definitions of saving, investment, and monetary equilibrium shape apparently substantive disagreements, and why Amonn regards the prevention of cumulative disturbances as a more defensible policy aim than a guaranteed programme of uninterrupted growth.

Can labour explain capital formation without treating saving as its original cause? In this critical essay, Alfred Amonn examines Alexander Kokkalis’s attempt to rebuild economic theory around human productive powers. Kokkalis locates productive advance in invention, organization, and education rather than abstention from consumption; even the maintenance of workers becomes part of production, not merely its endpoint. Amonn takes these connections seriously while testing the distinctions that sustain them: between natural conditions and controllable means, and between directive intellectual labour and executive bodily labour. The essay’s interest lies in this combination of sympathetic reconstruction and conceptual scrutiny. It allows readers to see how redefining labour changes the explanation of capital, income, and wages—and where that explanation depends on contestable premises.

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.”

Can an economy gain from foreign trade without changing its domestic institutions? In this review-essay on Ernst Heuss’s Wirtschaftssysteme und internationaler Handel, Alfred Amonn examines trade policy through the economic arrangements it sustains. His sympathetic exposition brings out the stakes of Heuss’s approach: exchange controls may undermine market coordination, while tariffs may protect not simply producers but a particular distribution of income. The tension becomes especially concrete when a centrally planned economy bargains as a single buyer and seller against dispersed market participants. By following Amonn’s presentation, readers can distinguish restrictions that Heuss regards as necessary to preserve an economic system from measures that may instead transform it—a different test from asking whether a policy merely increases trade.

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.”