3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Knowledge is no ornament and its diffusion no work for court jesters, Kerschagl insists — it is as materially vital as the erection of industrial plants. That conviction anchors this treatment of development aid, written just after its author took the presidency of the Austrian UNESCO Commission, which ranges across population theory from Malthus to Nurkse's circular causation, the psychology of entitlement and colonial guilt, and the institutional scaffolding of trade unions, honest bureaucracy, and stable currency. Identifying mass poverty and illiteracy as the true marks of a development area, it ranks agriculture before heavy industry, holds up the Marshall Plan as a model that cannot be transplanted into pre-industrial economies, and presses throughout the principle of Hilfe für Selbsthilfe against both beggar ideology and condescending charity.
Das Verhältnis zwischen Helfenden und Hilfe Empfangenden kann nicht das von Gönnern und Bettelnden sein, sondern nur das echter Partnerschaft.
English translation: “The relationship between those giving aid and those receiving it cannot be that of patrons and beggars, but only that of genuine partnership.”
To ask why taxes exist, this textbook contends, is really to ask why the state exists — every tax system is at bottom a theory of the state. Kerschagl's teaching text moves from the history of the tax state through Adam Smith's four canons, tax justice, universality, and the interdependence of prices, wages, and shifting that dissolves the tidy line between direct and indirect taxes, to a claim central to the welfare age: even the fully socialized Soviet economy cannot replace taxation with enterprise profit, leaning instead on a turnover tax that works as a consumption tax. A long comparative part then dissects the fiscal constitutions of the United States, the USSR, Italy, France, both Germanys, Benelux, Scandinavia, England, and Austria, exposing how divergent tax systems threaten EEC and EFTA integration.
Der Wohlfahrtsstaat des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts ist eben ein riesiger Ausgleichsmechanismus, durch den etwa die Hälfte aller originären Einkommen einem Prozeß der Neuverteilung unterzogen wird.
English translation: “The welfare state of the twentieth century is nothing other than a gigantic equalization mechanism, through which roughly half of all originary incomes is subjected to a process of redistribution.”
Every standard objection to development aid gets its hearing here first — that recipient states expropriate foreign property, drift toward socialism, squander funds through corruption, and repay generosity with nationalist ingratitude — before Kerschagl answers them one by one. Aid can check communist expansion as the Marshall Plan once did, even if friends cannot be bought; a new humanitas demands it; and corruption is met not by withholding help but by devising controls that spare the delicate matter of sovereignty. He contrasts Western dollar loans, repayable in hard currency, with Eastern credits settled in goods, calls for a coordinating umbrella over the IFC, IDA, and Export-Import Bank, and argues — invoking Nehru's claim that knowledge matters as much as bread — that material aid is worthless without education.
Diese Hilfe müsse aber so rasch wie möglich geleistet werden; denn es sei besser, einen Brand in seinen Anfängen zu löschen als bereits niedergebrannte Ruinen nutzlos unter Einsatz einer wirtschaftlichen oder politischen Feuerwehr zu retten.
English translation: “But this aid, it is said, must be rendered as quickly as possible; for it is better to extinguish a fire at its beginnings than uselessly to try to salvage already burned-out ruins by deploying an economic or political fire brigade.”
Could a failed businessman and writer serving successive political masters nevertheless be a consistent reformer? Richard Kerschagl’s 1965 article defends Daniel Defoe by separating commercial fortunes and political employment from enduring commitments, especially religious toleration. Its strongest evidence lies in concrete institutional proposals: bankruptcy laws that preserve a debtor’s ability to repay, contributory pensions, and education open to women. Kerschagl reads these projects sympathetically as anticipations of later reforms, while attending to the financial and political obstacles to their adoption. The result shifts attention from the familiar novelist to a pamphleteer concerned with how institutions might reduce suffering—and gives readers grounds to reconsider whether apparent utopianism belongs to a proposal itself or to the circumstances in which it first appears.
Daniel Defoe foretold what Robert Owen would later attempt to complete: this essay pairs the mercantilist pamphleteer with the cooperative experimenter across more than a century of English social thought. Defoe the writer and projector favored state intervention, wage and price regulation, workhouses, and insurance; Owen the experimenter staked his fortune on New Lanark, New Harmony, labour-exchange banks, and semi-autarkic commonwealths, seeking to abolish the money economy itself. Kerschagl reads both as forerunners of the concern with full employment later crowned by Keynes, then widens the frame to a third figure, John Law, arguing that differing social origins — petty trade, banking, early industry — shaped each man's remedies. Defoe survives in memory chiefly as the author of Robinson Crusoe; Owen's so-called utopias, the essay contends, have become realities.
Aus einer objektiven und echten Geschichte der sozialen Ideen sind aber beide Männer gleichermaßen nicht wegzudenken.
English translation: “From any objective and genuine history of social ideas, however, neither of the two men can be omitted.”
A central bank can be charged with protecting purchasing power while lacking authority over the wages, taxes, and public spending that help determine it. This mismatch drives Richard Kerschagl’s 1967 article. He treats interest rates and reserve requirements not as reliable levers but as instruments whose effects depend on business financing, confidence, and government policy: higher rates may even increase production costs. His proposed remedy is strikingly political—cabinet participation with veto rights over economic decisions and decisive influence on wage-price policy. Giving currency stability priority over full employment, Kerschagl nevertheless resists turning central banking into comprehensive economic planning. The article exposes the tension within that position: how much power over the wider economy can a guardian of monetary stability acquire without compromising the market order it seeks to preserve?
Neither in its causes nor in its effects is inflation a purely monetary affair, this wide-ranging treatise maintains: it springs from the plain fact that too many people want everything at once. Kerschagl treats it as a fraud against savers, pensioners, and creditors and as the greatest economic revolution imaginable — expropriating money-holders, rewarding debtors including the state, and dissolving the accounting on which capitalist calculation rests. Across coin debasement in Rome, John Law's Banque Royale, the assignats, and the German, English, French, and American inflations of the twentieth century, he weighs quantity theory against Schumpeter and Keynes, dismisses gold as no reliable safeguard, and denies that full employment can ever be bought with fiduciary credit. Stable money, he concludes, is the precondition of democracy, welfare, and freedom alike.
Gold ist kein Heilmittel, auch nicht gegen Inflation.
English translation: “Gold is no remedy, not even against inflation.”
Did the alchemists ever truly make gold? Kerschagl's concise history answers no — not a single controlled specimen survives — while insisting that the quest was never mainly about gold at all: most adepts were physicians and apothecaries chasing elixirs, panaceas, and remedies. From Mesopotamian metallurgy and Alexandrian experiment through Arab transmission, Paracelsus's turn from speculation toward empirical medicine, and the frauds of Cagliostro, Casanova, and the gold-makers at Rudolf II's Prague court, the book separates genuine discovery — mercury, phosphorus, porcelain, mineral acids — from delusion and swindle. It closes with Franz Joseph's skeptical assay trials and the twentieth century's nuclear transmutation of mercury into gold, scientifically real yet economically pointless. Alchemy's failed quest, the verdict runs, nonetheless vastly enlarged human knowledge.
Nur ein kleiner Teil der Arbeit der Alchimisten war in Wirklichkeit der Suche nach dem künstlichen Gold gewidmet.
English translation: “Only a small part of the alchemists' work was in reality devoted to the search for artificial gold.”
Banks can multiply financial claims—but can they create the productive resources those claims promise? In this contribution to Viktor Mataja’s edited Lehrbuch der Volkswirtschaftspolitik, Richard Kerschagl makes that distinction the test of monetary and credit policy. He acknowledges deposit-money creation while rejecting the notion that lending can sustain itself independently of capital, confidence, and liquidity. His comparisons of European central banks with the Federal Reserve expose a practical tension: closer supervision can strengthen credit control without removing the risks of expansion. Equally revealing is his distinction between a solvent bank needing temporary cash and an institution suffering irrecoverable losses. Readers encounter a case for selective intervention bounded by concrete financial constraints, and an explanation of why neither inflation nor subsequent deflation can simply restore lost wealth.
Full employment conjured from uncovered credit repeats, on Kerschagl's reading, John Law's old error: trying to replace scarce capital with purchasing power. This 1953 essay argues that printing money before consumable goods exist does not abolish scarcity but forces present consumers to finance future production through lower real consumption or higher prices—there are, he warns, no miracle cures. Keynes is placed within that line of reformers, and Dobretsberger's scheme to finance hydropower by note issue serves as the test case: domestically buildable, perhaps, but the new purchasing power would arrive long before the electricity. Against the illusion Kerschagl sets a real-factor remedy of deliberate austerity—new capital formed only through saving and work, weak accumulation traced to three inflations, and employment secured not by protected inefficiency but by rising productivity across all sectors.
Erhöhte Arbeitsleistung je Arbeiter zerstört nicht Arbeitsplätze, sondern schafft neue.
English translation: “Increased output per worker does not destroy jobs; it creates new ones.”