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Four American economists, each faulting a different part of the Positive Theorie des Kapitals and each prescribing a different remedy, gave Böhm-Bawerk the occasion to restate his account of interest under pressure. Against Horace White, who traced returns to the shrewdness of captains of industry, he separates entrepreneurial profit from normal capital interest, which must rest on an objective basis like land rent. Against Hugo Bilgram he defends plural cost concepts and locates the demand for present goods in workers selling immature labor for subsistence. To Macvane he grants the productivity of roundabout methods while insisting on diminishing increments distinct from the law of the soil, and against his doubt that future goods can have value, he reaffirms that value is psychical and subjective. Hawley, he judges, had not read the book.
Die Talente und das Glück der seltenen captains of industry haben mit dem zu tun, was man Unternehmergewinn nennt, aber nicht mit dem normalen Kapitalzins.
English translation: “The talents and good fortune of the rare captains of industry have to do with what is called entrepreneurial profit, but not with the normal interest on capital.”
Against J. B. Clark's notion of a "true capital"—a permanent fund of productive wealth standing behind the changing machines and materials that compose it—Böhm-Bawerk mounts the first of his replies to American critics of the Positive Theory. He grants Clark much on abstinence and the trade-off between present and future enjoyment, but attacks the abstraction as a mystical double of real things: capital, he insists, has no causal existence apart from the concrete goods it comprises. He defends his phrase "goods of the same kind and number" as a logical control on time-preference, dismantles Clark's claim that true capital abolishes the production period—the tanner's leather is the true fruit of his labor, not the shoes he trades for—and warns that where words come to rule things, scientific clarity is irretrievably lost.
Nun, ich kenne kein anderes Kapital als die konkreten Güter, die dasselbe zusammensetzen, und ich glaube: auch die Welt der Tatsachen kennt kein anderes.
English translation: “Now, I know of no capital other than the concrete goods that compose it, and I believe that the world of facts likewise knows of no other.”
When General Francis A. Walker charged that the Austrian history of interest theories had been ungenerous and pedantic, Böhm-Bawerk answered with a four-part rejoinder that turned the attack back on productivity doctrine itself. Across questions of historical criticism, capital as a factor of production, the sources of interest, and the relation of production to value, he insists that noticing a surplus - a machine costing fifty dollars that yields fifty-three - is not yet explaining it. The decisive puzzle is why competition fails to bid up the instrument's value or bid down the product's price. Walker's appeal to scarcity and high demand, he argues, names conditions without supplying the mechanism, and interest can be grasped only through the premium present goods command over future ones. Time, not production, proves the more fundamental category.
Und die berühmte und weit verbreitete Abstinenztheorie ist ebenfalls nur eine Erfindung meiner kritischen Phantasie.
English translation: “And the famous and widely disseminated abstinence theory is likewise only an invention of my critical fancy.”
Schumpeter had argued that interest belongs only to dynamic capitalist development, a temporary levy on the profit of the innovating entrepreneur that vanishes once competition routinizes his new combinations. Böhm-Bawerk declares the thesis mistaken from the outset and dismantles it internally, empirically, and conceptually. He exposes an equivocation between the rare creative pioneer and the mass imitator, insists that possession of the means of production is irrelevant to imputation, and turns Schumpeter's own concession about the greater yield of longer production methods into proof that present goods command an agio even in a static economy. Rental housing, ordinary firms, mortgages, and state securities keep paying interest without entrepreneurial breakthroughs; no real economy, past or present, has ever lacked it. In essence, he maintains, there is only one interest.
Der Kapitalzins ist und bleibt das, wofür ihn alle Welt mit gutem Grund seit jeher gehalten hat: ein statischer Einkommenszweig.
English translation: “Interest on capital is and remains that which, with good reason, all the world has ever taken it to be: a static branch of income.”
After more than thirty years of trade surpluses, Austria-Hungary's balance turned sharply passive after 1907, sinking to 822.9 million crowns in the red by 1912 — a reversal this newspaper essay sets out to explain. Böhm-Bawerk brushes aside the easy culprits of bad harvests and blocked exports and draws a finer distinction: a passive balance can mark a rich creditor nation paid in goods, or a poor country financing itself through foreign borrowing. The monarchy, he argues, is the latter, and not from productive industrialization but from feeble domestic saving and profligate state, provincial, and municipal spending that drains scarce capital. Reading the trade figures through the wider balance of payments, he insists that goods must ultimately be settled by goods, and that the deficit will dissolve only once lax public budgets are consolidated.
Die Zahlungsbilanz befiehlt, die Handelsbilanz gehorcht, nicht umgekehrt.
English translation: “The balance of payments commands, the trade balance obeys, not the other way around.”
Beginning from the ambiguity buried in the word "Wert," this 1886 essay — revived here as No. 11 in the London School of Economics series of reprints of scarce economic tracts — separates subjective value from objective exchange value and makes the former the base of the whole science. A good's worth, Böhm-Bawerk argues, is not a property lodged in things but its marginal utility: the least important want its available stock still covers, dramatized by an isolated colonist ranking five sacks of grain from survival down to feeding parrots, and by the old puzzle that diamonds command more than water. He then carries the same logic into market price, formed through the valuations of the "marginal pairs" of buyers and sellers, and shows that the law of cost operates not beside marginal utility but within it.
Eine Nationalökonomie, die die Theorie des subjektiven Wertes nicht entwickelt, ist in die Luft gebaut.
English translation: “An economics that does not develop the theory of subjective value is built on air.”
Böhm-Bawerk, asked in 1911 to advise the imperial ministry on economics teaching at the University of Graz, turned an administrative query into a defense of theory itself. Modern economic life, he argues, has grown too broad and too consequential for a single professor: Graz needs two chairs, one cultivating pure theory as the organizing foundation, the other commanding applied fields such as trade policy, banking, money, and agrarian and social policy, with statistics admitted only as a subordinate add-on. The memorandum then becomes a pointed intervention in the afterlife of the Methodenstreit, attacking the retiring Hildebrand's theory-hostile historicism as fanatically one-sided. Among the candidates one stands out above the rest, the young Schumpeter, whose brilliance and productivity, he warns, must not be lost to Austrian scholarship abroad.
Schumpeter ist ein eminent theoretischer Kopf, von glänzender Begabung und enormer Urteilskraft und Produktivität.
English translation: “Schumpeter is an eminently theoretical mind, of brilliant talent and enormous judgment and productivity.”
Whether rights and relations belong among genuine economic goods looks like a minor classificatory puzzle, and Böhm-Bawerk shows it is anything but. This early inquiry argues that the unclear status of immaterial goods has quietly distorted the central doctrines of capital, interest, and credit. He dismantles MacLeod's claim that credit creates wealth, granting that it follows with sound but blind logic from premises the prevailing theory itself supplies, then rejects the evasion of negative goods and faults Roscher for treating rights as goods for the individual economy but not for the whole. No verdict on rights is possible, he concludes, until the general concept of an economic good is itself made clear, the foundational task to which his later value and capital theory would answer.
Ein Praktiker könnte sich vielleicht damit zufrieden geben, daß die irrigen Resultate abgelehnt worden sind. Der Theoretiker darf es nicht: er muß fordern, daß die Ablehnung auch aus dem richtigen Grund erfolge.
English translation: “A practitioner might perhaps be content that the erroneous results have been rejected. The theorist must not be: he must demand that the rejection proceed from the correct ground as well.”