The archive.

The unglamorous problem of covering the Reich deficit becomes the occasion for a theory of who ultimately bears a general turnover tax. A moderate increase, Schumpeter argues, is administratively the easiest of all measures and discriminates less against saving than income or inheritance taxes—no tax being an ideal in any case. The conceptual center is incidence: he dismisses the sterile dispute over whether the levy is direct or indirect, since legal form never fixes economic burden. The Umsatzsteuer's very generality blocks escape into untaxed branches, yet full shifting to consumers would demand a rising price level that Reichsbank policy forbids. Because a tax on value turnover differs from one per physical unit, it favors decreasing-cost and burdens increasing-cost industries, with a nod to Marshall—its incidence diffuse, structurally mediated, and precisely thereby tolerable.

Wenn wir einen paradox klingenden Satz riskieren dürfen – die Allgemeinheit dieser »Verbrauchssteuer« beraubt sie ihres Charakters als Verbrauchssteuer.

English translation: “If we may venture a paradoxical-sounding proposition — the very generality of this »consumption tax« robs it of its character as a consumption tax.”

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.”

Modern culture, for all its machinery, has not freed anyone from material dependence, and that unfreedom, Schwiedland contends, now shapes character, morality, and world politics alike. His survey of the West's crisis runs from the psychic toll of rationalization and big-city life, through capitalism, individualism, and imperialism, to a social question that has outgrown classes and nations to set whole continents against one another. Europe, exhausted by war and stripped of prestige, confronts three non-European powers, the United States, Russia, and Japan, while its former colonies industrialize and awaken to national self-determination. Against economic feudalism by cartel and trust, he urges European integration, Riedl's collective trade treaties, and the League of Nations, insisting that peace must be built by deliberate effort, not awaited.

Willst du Kriege vermieden sehen, so organisiere den Frieden.

English translation: “If you wish to see wars avoided, then organize peace.”

Every endogenous theory of crisis, this 1928 essay contends, must in the end become a theory of disproportion — not a hunt for one privileged cause but an inquiry into which mismatches harden into cyclical form. Lederer locates the decisive asymmetry in unequal elasticity: raw materials and profits rise faster than wages, salaries, and interest, so accumulation shifts the social product away from consumption even as real wages climb. Ordinary discrepancies self-correct through price and capital movements; crisis begins only when a distributive disproportion becomes rigid and resists the market's usual repair. Banks and technical innovation amplify the swing. Against those who would cure a slump by lending alone, he warns that producer credit cannot conjure the final purchasing power output needs, and that noninflationary recovery would demand a degree of coordinated planning beyond the ordinary banking system.

Eine Diskrepanz der Einkommen aber löst keine Gegenbewegung im Angebot der Arbeitskräfte aus.

English translation: “A discrepancy in incomes, however, triggers no counter-movement in the supply of labor.”

Because the study of foreign trade sets every part of economic theory in motion, Schüller refuses to reason from abstract 'branches of production' and turns instead to real firms making the same good at different costs, so that imports strike down the high-cost producer while the low-cost one survives. On that footing he rebuilds the free-trade case, reading the comparative-cost doctrine of Ricardo and Mill as tacitly resting on a subjective theory of price, and gauging tariffs by the spread of domestic costs and the degree of foreign superiority. The later chapters turn to postwar currency disorder and the revival of mercantilist reflexes, to cartel dumping and the Brussels Sugar Convention, to the transfer problem of reparations and interstate debt, and to the hard prospects of customs unions among sovereign states.

Von entscheidender Bedeutung ist, daß die Erreichung entsprechender Erleichterungen für die Ausfuhr vorteilhafter ist als die Behinderung der Einfuhr.

English translation: “It is of decisive importance that achieving corresponding facilitations for exports is more advantageous than obstructing imports.”

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.”

A schoolboy's enchantment with kings, battles and epic history sets the scene for this autobiographical and sociological essay, in which Wieser retraces how Herbert Spencer's assault on the 'Great Man Theory' and Tolstoy's War and Peace taught him to see masses, inherited institutions and social conditions at work in history. He grants Spencer's strongest point — even genius depends on historical preparation, inheriting language, needs and rivalries — but refuses to let social conditioning exhaust the meaning of the exceptional individual: the new idea arises within history yet cannot be derived from antecedent causes. Leader and people are reciprocal, the seed and its enactment, and no progress, martial or peaceful, succeeds without leadership. An early statement of the agency-and-structure problem before the terms existed, it rehabilitates the schoolroom's 'arma virumque' as hero and people together.

Der Uebermensch wird erst zum Propheten, indem er zur Masse spricht, die Masse wird erst zum kraftvoll geordneten freien Volk, indem sie sich unter die besten Führer stellt.

English translation: “The superman becomes a prophet only by speaking to the masses; the masses become a vigorously ordered, free people only by placing themselves under the best leaders.”

National spirit, for Schumpeter, is real only as a historically shifting pattern of dispositions lodged in social strata—never a single essence or moral trait, and altered whenever the relative weight of classes shifts. Refusing both the romanticized Volksgeist and its reduction to statistics, he reads Germany since unification through class morphology, replacing the one social pyramid with coexisting agrarian and industrial hierarchies. Urbanization is irreversible; the peasantry, having secured its essential aims, now stabilizes rather than threatens the order; the nobility, bred for service rather than independent leadership, cannot lead, and neither can the ever-mobile industrialist—so present-day Germany, he concludes, has no leading class at all. Workers grow into the strongest power yet seek a socially secured petty-bourgeois existence, while the swelling ranks of salaried employees and officials promise a future stamped by bureaucracy.

Der Bauer hat gesiegt. Innerhalb der ländlichen Sphäre hat er im Wesen, was er wollte. Aus dem revolutionärsten ist er zum konservativsten Element unseres Volkes geworden.

English translation: “The peasant has triumphed. Within the rural sphere he has, in essence, what he wanted. From the most revolutionary he has become the most conservative element of our people.”

When the young Schumpeter proposed to accept the Austrian school's results while discarding its 'psychological' foundations, Wieser answered that method and result cannot be prised apart. These critical glosses defend an economics grounded not in the epistemology of exact natural science but in the practical consciousness of valuing, choosing, calculating agents. Against Schumpeter's use of hypotheses modelled on physics, Wieser insists that Austrian theory idealizes from experience rather than positing fictions. The collected essays carry the argument into value theory proper: value flows from utility but only marginal utility, imputation assigns product shares to land, labour and capital, and the law of cost is contained within the law of marginal utility — a double refutation of natural-scientific formalism and of the labour-cost reductions of value pressed by socialists and Ricardians alike.

Der Wert der Güter leitet sich gänzlich von ihrem Nutzen ab, aber ihr Nutzen läßt sich nicht zur Gänze in Wert verwandeln.

English translation: “The value of goods is derived entirely from their utility, but their utility cannot be wholly converted into value.”

Wieser's Vienna inaugural lecture treats the value of money as a historical and institutional relation, not the value of an ordinary commodity. Starting from Menger's account of money's origin, he shifts from emergence to function: money splits the single barter act into independent sale and purchase, and gold stands in two economic relations at once, commodity when it serves personal needs, money when it circulates to open the whole traffic of goods to satisfaction. Money value, then, is an objective ratio between money and all goods entering exchange. Against a mechanical quantity theory, Wieser insists that credit substitutes, velocity and inherited prices make developed monetary systems elastic, so new gold works through institutions rather than in strict proportion. A third source of long-run change is the expansion of the money economy itself, as taxes, wages and military finance are drawn into monetary calculation.

Wenn Geld und Ware in ihrem Wesen einen Gegensatz zeigen, so müssen sie auch in ihrem Werte einen Gegensatz zeigen.

English translation: “If money and commodity show an opposition in their essence, they must also show an opposition in their value.”

Money value is where personal valuation, market calculation, national income and historical institution meet — and this extended report refuses to treat it as a merely technical currency question. Wieser separates personal value, grounded in marginal utility, from the national-economic 'Geltung' a good holds through its price, then argues that money as money has exchange value only. The general price level is a composite determined from the side of goods and the side of money alike, so quantity theory errs in reading it as money's work alone; the faithful index of money value is the relation between money income and real income. Changes flow from paper issue, newly coined metal, and above all from monetization, as rents, taxes and state services enter monetary accounting. A closing report extends the theory to exchange rates and warns that index numbers cannot isolate money value from commodity values.

Das Aufblühen der Geldwirtschaft vermindert den Geldwert, ihr Verfall erhöht ihn wieder.

English translation: “The flourishing of the money economy diminishes the value of money; its decay raises the value of money once again.”

Out of the wreck of the Habsburg monetary union came a scatter of new currencies, and this survey sets them side by side as they steadied toward the end of the 1920s: Austria's Schilling, Hungary's Pengő, the Czechoslovak crown forged in Rašín's stamping experiment, Poland's twice-stabilised Zloty, the lira, dinar, lei and, after hyperinflation, the German Reichsmark. Kerschagl narrates each path from collapse to reform, then appends the machinery behind them—gold-parity tables computed from fine-gold weights, statutory redemption and reserve rules, and central-bank balance sheets as of March 1929. One principle recurs across the reforms: sound reconstruction meant barring further state credit from the note press. Issued under the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftstag, it serves as much as a reference apparatus as a history.

Die wichtigste Bestimmung war die, daß jede weitere direkte oder indirekte Kreditgewährung an den Staat unzulässig sei.

English translation: “The most important provision was that any further direct or indirect extension of credit to the state was inadmissible.”