1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
John Bates Clark had claimed that wages, interest, and rent alike could be settled by a single marginal-productivity principle, the product neatly exhausted by its factors. Strigl’s compact intervention in Austrian distribution theory dismantles that equation as an unproven technical hypothesis rather than a law of value, then rebuilds interest on other ground. Reserving marginal-productivity pricing for the “primary” factors of labor and land, and following Böhm-Bawerk in treating capital as the wage-and-rent fund that finances time-consuming roundabout production, he shows that once workers and landowners are paid what added units would yield elsewhere, a surplus must remain. Competition cannot erase it where it appears in every capitalist enterprise; it becomes a residual rent attributable to the fund that makes waiting possible — and this residual, Strigl argues, is capital interest itself.
Trotzdem bleibt die statische Kapitalzinstheorie von grundlegender Bedeutung, da ihr Gesetz den Ruhepunkt definiert, dem auch die dynamische Wirtschaft jederzeit zustrebt, wobei nur immer neue Störungen die völlige Ausgleichung hindern.
English translation: “Nevertheless the static theory of capital interest remains of fundamental significance, since its law defines the resting point toward which the dynamic economy at all times strives, while only ever-new disturbances prevent complete equalization.”
Before economics can state a single law, Strigl argues, it must decide what “economy” actually means — and ordinary language, saturated with technical, legal, ethical, and social associations, cannot supply the answer. This methodological prolegomenon grounds theoretical economics in pure “economic categories,” the necessary forms in which any economic fact must be grasped, beginning from Gottl’s Lebensnot, the bare condition that goods fall short of wants. The variable “data” of an economy — needs, techniques, milieu, social organization — are not external givens but concretizations of those categories, realized through what Strigl calls the Organisation der Wirtschaft. Against the historical school’s relativism and against Amonn’s attempt to define economics through social exchange, he insists that Crusoe’s isolated household, communist planning, and the market alike remain objects of one law-science.
Die theoretische Nationalökonomie ist keine Sozialwissenschaft, sondern enthält Aussagen über Begriffe, welche soziale und auch nichtsoziale Erscheinungen erfassen können.
English translation: “Theoretical economics is not a social science; rather, it contains propositions about concepts that can encompass social as well as non-social phenomena.”
Demand becomes a precise economic concept, in this compact encyclopedia entry for the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, only once money mediates exchange and separates the buyer’s side from the seller’s. Strigl’s decisive move is to distinguish mere desire from kaufkräftige Nachfrage — demand backed by the ability and willingness to pay — and to show that price is the device that selects which wants become effective. Because wants outrun the scarce stock, the ranking of demand turns not on urgency of need alone but on wealth and the subjective valuation of money, so price theory explains allocation, not moral desert. He follows the argument to legal maximum prices, where a ceiling below the market-clearing level produces excess demand rationed by queues or cards, and to the Grenzkäufer whose bid guides production itself.
Nur ein Teil der Nachfrage kann jeweils mit dem begrenzten Gütervorrate befriedigt werden.
English translation: “Only a portion of demand can, in any given case, be satisfied out of the limited stock of goods.”
A tennis player’s racket interrupting a ball in flight gives Strigl his governing image: economic theory can explain motion between externally given changes in the data, but not the intervention itself. This inquiry into the applicability of economic theory maps the border between economic law and everything that alters its material — needs, technology, law, organization, nature, expectation, and social psychology. Strigl’s central taxonomy divides exogenous data changes, which theory must accept as altered facts, from the narrower endogenous ones that arise within the economic process through saving and the intertemporal ranking of wants. Where an exogenous shift breaks the chain, theory meets a Bruchstelle it cannot bridge; it can only register that something has changed. From this boundary work he projects a future Datentheorie to discipline the application of economic law.
Es ist nun ganz unbezweifelbar, daß außer diesen exogenen Datenänderungen auch noch endogene Datenänderungen möglich sind, das sind solche, welche aus dem wirtschaftlichen Geschehen selbst und kraft der Gesetzlichkeit der Wirtschaft folgen.
English translation: “It is now quite beyond doubt that, apart from these exogenous changes in the data, endogenous changes in the data are also possible—namely, those which follow from the economic process itself and by virtue of the lawful regularity of the economy.”
The rift between theory and practice runs deeper in economics than in almost any other field, and this essay sets out to bridge rather than deny it. Theory, Strigl argues, discovers causal relations but cannot choose political ends; classical liberalism only seemed to unite the two because it quietly adopted an end of its own — national wealth, the wealth of nations — which cannot by itself settle questions of distribution, welfare, or national power. When policy abandons theory altogether, it does not escape theory but falls into “vulgar economics,” a patchwork of exploitation claims and slogans that blames merchants for high prices and treats faster money circulation as a cure. Rebuilt on marginal analysis and a theory of the economy’s data, pure theory earns its service role: not dictating aims, but showing what follows from chosen means.
Man sieht hier deutlich, wie der liberale Freihandelsgedanke den wirtschaftlichen Erfolg ganz allein in den Vordergrund rückt.
English translation: “One sees clearly here how the liberal free-trade idea places economic success alone in the foreground.”
Who legally pays a tax tells you almost nothing about who ultimately bears it — this is the wedge Strigl drives through the theory of tax shifting. Building a deliberately simplified static economy of circular flow, where entrepreneurs buy factors and sell at cost price without profit or loss, he shows that a levy on labor or land alters demand, supply, output, and prices whether the buyer or the seller formally remits it, so that incidence turns on the elasticity of supply and demand rather than on legal form. An income tax generally cannot be shifted, since the purchasing power it removes reappears as state demand; a tax on entrepreneurial profit is the archetype of the non-shiftable tax, yet by starving capital formation and blunting competition it harms the very factor owners and consumers it seems to spare.
Man kann leicht sehen, daß der Unternehmer nicht einfach den Betrag der Steuer auf den Preis des Produktes aufschlagen kann.
English translation: “It is easy to see that the entrepreneur cannot simply add the amount of the tax onto the price of the product.”
Statutes, reserve rules, and central-bank independence all fail, Strigl warns, against the one authority that can suspend them — the state itself. Written amid the crisis after 1929, as several central banks drifted back toward expansionary “accommodating” policy, this essay asks whether a currency can be secured against political manipulation rather than mere mismanagement. Its conceptual pivot is a reversal of Gresham’s law: where people are free to denominate contracts, wages, and credit in a sounder foreign currency, good money drives out bad, and depreciating money survives only through ignorance, habit, or coercion. Strigl’s remedy is not a new currency scheme but a legal one — treaties binding states never to prohibit a partner’s currency, creating an automatic and sensitive index of monetary health. A state that cannot outlaw the foreign money cannot inflate.
Der Geist der Zeit ist inflationistisch und manche Völker werden für ihre Heilung von währungspolitischen Irrtümern jetzt wieder schweres Lehrgeld zahlen müssen.
English translation: “The spirit of the age is inflationist, and some peoples will now once again have to pay dearly to be cured of their monetary-policy errors.”
Mandeville and Adam Smith showed that a market can turn private self-interest into social coordination; Strigl's 1933 offprint, printed for the Association of Austrian Banks and Bankers, denies that this licenses the state to grant favors to particular firms and trades. He tests the interventionist slogan that every branch of national labor has a claim to protection and finds it hollow: imports do not make employment vanish but merely shift it while raising costs, wages, and consumer prices, and rescuing loss-making firms diverts scarce capital from productive uses. Such policy he names anti-selectionist, since it freezes existing arrangements against necessary structural change, and he traces a self-reinforcing spiral in which crisis breeds intervention and intervention deepens crisis. Every measure, he insists, must face one objective test: whether it serves the whole or only a favored few.
Eine gefährliche Schraube ohne Ende.
English translation: “A dangerous screw without end.”
Problems of production must be approached first through the real relations of goods, Strigl argues, and only then through the veil of money — the reverse of the usual procedure. Published in the Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie in 1934, this essay reconstructs capital as a wage fund: a stock of subsistence goods that carries workers through the roundabout processes of production, bound into intermediate goods by investment and released again as finished consumer goods. He reconciles the old wage-fund doctrine with marginal-productivity theory through the interest rate, which regulates the length of production, and then turns to money capital as an independent factor. Drawing on the Wicksell-Mises circulation-credit theory, he shows how bank credit finances longer processes without a matching subsistence fund, tearing apart the structure of production until liquidation forces a crisis.
Die unzureichende Freisetzung von Kapital in der Gestalt von Fertigprodukten muß Anlaß zur Krise werden.
English translation: “The insufficient release of capital in the form of finished products must become the occasion of a crisis.”
When Frank Knight attacked the notion that time plays any distinct role in production, he struck at the core of Bohm-Bawerk's capital theory; this 1935 essay for the Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie mounts the defense. Strigl concedes that the older formulations were rigid and sometimes misleading, but reconstructs the essential claim through a vertically integrated autarkic trust and a new concept, Bindungszeit — the time elapsing between a unit of labor and its finished consumer good. Lengthening binding times raises output; shortening them lowers it. Capital multiplied by time thus functions as a genuine factor subject to diminishing returns, so interest can be explained as its marginal product, and every capital good, he argues, must ultimately be traced back to original factors plus these Zinskostenelemente, the cost of time itself.
Daß da ohne Rücksicht auf die Formulierung doch ein richtiger Kern gegeben sein muß, zeigt die schließlich jedem Schulkind bekannte Regel, daß man Zinsen niemals anders als mit der Formel Kapital mal Zeit mal Zinssatz berechnen kann.
English translation: “That there must nevertheless be a correct core here, regardless of the formulation, is shown by the rule known in the end to every schoolchild: that interest can never be calculated except by the formula capital times time times the rate of interest.”
Austrian imputation theory and the Anglo-American theory of cost and returns had grown apart; Strigl's 1936 offprint sets out to build a common foundation for both, citing Bohm-Bawerk and Wieser alongside Sraffa, Chamberlin, and Joan Robinson. From the single assumption of indefinitely divisible factors he derives diminishing returns not as a technical necessity but as a consequence of economic selection among possible combinations, then reproduces the Wicksteed proof that marginal products exhaust the total product. The heart of the essay is the Quantenfaktor, the indivisible factor — above all durable fixed capital — whose original outlay is a merely historical cost, irrelevant to its present value, which residual imputation must nonetheless recover if the good is to be reproduced. From here he reaches free competition, monopolistic competition, and the problem of chronic excess capacity.
Es kann sich der Betrieb niemals in jenem Zustand befinden, in welchem eine Ausdehnung der Produktion zu geringeren Stückkosten führt.
English translation: “The firm can never find itself in a state in which an expansion of production would lead to lower unit costs.”
Meant to arm the reader against vulgar economic slogans and the reflexes of interest-group politics, this 1937 textbook compresses the secured foundations of economics into a single systematic course. Strigl begins from the free-market price as a selective mechanism, builds through diminishing returns, the Malthusian population law and its qualification by capital and technical progress, and marginal productivity as the key to wages and distribution. Capital enters as roundabout production and a subsistence fund, interest as the marginal product of capital-time. The later chapters carry the apparatus into money and the gold standard, the credit-driven boom and its Harvard-barometer crisis, tax shifting, comparative costs and the case against protection, and finally the socialist calculation problem. Throughout he insists that economics studies the consequences of measures and must never prescribe political ends.
Eine Darstellung wirtschaftlicher Zusammenhänge muß sich gegenüber allen Fragen der Politik neutral verhalten.
English translation: “A presentation of economic relationships must remain neutral with respect to all questions of policy.”