1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Interest on productive capital still lacked a settled explanation, and this 1908 study sets out to supply one. Working from subjective value theory in the lineage of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, yet breaking with the latter's agio theory, Engländer traces it to a structure illustrated by a fisherman and his net: the economic efficiency (Wirtschaftlichkeit) of a produced means, the divergent valuations of its maker and its user under the division of labor, and the self-interest that lets each keep part of the surplus through bargaining. He rejects positive imputation as neither practiced nor needed, denies that competition and the 'cost law' abolish profit, and treats the price difference between means and product not as the cause but as the visible sign of capital's productivity.
Denn, um es nochmals zu betonen, jeder Tausch muß für den Tauschenden von Vorteil sein, seine wirtschaftliche Lage muß hierdurch nach seiner Ansicht gebessert werden, weil er sonst den Tausch mangels eines Motives nicht eingehen würde.
English translation: “For, to emphasize it once more, every exchange must be advantageous to the one exchanging; his economic situation must, in his view, be improved thereby, because otherwise, lacking a motive, he would not enter into the exchange.”
Because money satisfies no need directly, a buyer's maximum bid can only be the wealth left once more urgent wants are secured—never the monetary measure of a good's value. From this psychological foundation, drawn from Franz Brentano by way of Marty and Kraus, Engländer rebuilds price theory around ranked preferences, the 'price-willingness paradox' by which the bid per unit can fall faster than quantity rises, and prices that settle below a buyer's maximum. Competition among unequal buyers, he shows, fixes only upper and lower limits set by marginal and excluded strata, never a unique price; the missing determinant comes from the seller side and the cost law, in which labor stands as the terminal factor whose own price rests on the quantity actually employed.
Der Käufer hat keine Möglichkeit einer unmittelbaren Schätzung des Geldes in der Art, wie er eine unmittelbare Schätzung eines Gutes erster Ordnung nach der von diesem Gute abhängigen Bedürfnisbefriedigung vornimmt.
English translation: “The buyer has no possibility of directly appraising money in the way in which he directly appraises a first-order good according to the satisfaction of needs that depends on that good.”
Freight is no neutral overlay on the map; in this transport theory it dictates where goods are produced, what they cost, and how far they travel. Written by a railway director and professor at Prague, the book follows freight charges outward from a single production point across concentric market areas, deriving sales radii that shrink in inverse proportion to the rate, market areas varying with the square of distance, and Thünen-like rings of agricultural intensity around a consuming city. Part II turns to the rates themselves, contrasting the monopolist's drive for maximum net revenue with a 'public-benefit' tariff aimed at the greatest summation of primary values, and argues through Böhm-Bawerk's subtractive imputation that freight rates must rest on willingness to pay, with marginal cost as their floor.
Nicht weil die Bahn an Kosten erspart, gewährt sie den Nachlaß, sondern damit sie an Kosten erspare.
English translation: “It is not because the railway saves costs that it grants the rebate; rather, it grants the rebate in order to save costs.”
Where earlier theory chose between technique and valuation, the first part of Engländer's system attempts to weld the two together. The objective-technical structure derives relative prices from labor and production conditions; the subjective-social derives them from valuation and income. Grounding value in the psychic phenomena of desiring goods and avoiding evils, he builds from primary values through economic value, cost, and yield to market price, insisting there is no necessary link between a good's higher marginal utility and a higher price. Rent emerges as scarcity plus the differential advantage of fertility and location; wages and capital interest are handled as factor prices. Yet interest, he concedes, resists convincing derivation here, and its fuller treatment is postponed to the theory of money in Part II.
Nach dem Sprachgebrauch der klassischen Schule erklärt der objektiv-technische Preisaufbau wohl den natürlichen Preis, aber nicht den um den natürlichen Preis oszillierenden Marktpreis.
English translation: “According to the usage of the Classical School, the objective-technical price structure indeed explains the natural price, but not the market price oscillating around the natural price.”
Reserved from the first part were money, capital, and interest; the second volume takes them up. Engländer opens with money 'without intrinsic value,' deriving the total sum of prices from quantity, true cash reserves, market frequency, and velocity, and rejecting any appeal to the marginal utility of fiat money. He then argues that a purely cashless economy of book transfers is theoretically possible, and that bank book-credit does not itself create capital but frees idle reserves. The capital theory works upward from a single-stage economy of capitalists and workers to multi-stage and free-stage production, bounding the interest rate between the highest 'provision number' and the lowest 'sacrifice number' while denying that the productivity of roundabout methods explains interest at all. Cycles, he concludes, are not the inevitable fate of capitalism if saving is properly timed.
Nehmen wir nun noch den Fall eines Barerlages bei einer Bank, und zwar zu bloßen Verwahrungszwecken, so ergibt sich die Möglichkeit, daß die Bank diese bei ihr erlegten Gelder weiterverleiht.
English translation: “If we now consider further the case of a cash deposit at a bank, and indeed one made merely for safekeeping purposes, the possibility arises that the bank lends out these funds deposited with it.”
Knowing where a tax truly lands, this 1935 treatise argues, must precede any judgment of tax policy. Engländer separates two domains of public finance—general tax theory and the theory of tax shifting—and grounds the obligation to pay not in any equivalence between tax and state service but in the value of the organized community itself. Tracing incidence through his own price theory, he reaches a pointed conclusion: a consumption tax does not merely burden consumers but, by curbing their spending elsewhere, drives down other producers' returns until it merges with the workings of direct taxation. From the Bernoulli-Bentham law of sacrifice he derives progressive rates and exemption of the subsistence minimum, then rejects every single-tax scheme in favor of a system that combines direct and indirect taxes to satisfy competing principles at once.
Nicht die Kaufkraft der Einkommen vermindert sich, sondern indem ein besonderes Staatseinkommen aus Steuern auftritt, vermindern sich die anderen Einkommen.
English translation: “It is not the purchasing power of incomes that diminishes; rather, as a distinct state income from taxes arises, the other incomes diminish.”