The archive.

How could readers find their way through Austria’s accumulating wartime economic regulations? In this brief 1917 review, Emil Lederer assesses the second edition of a directory issued by the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and Industry. His interest lies in practical access rather than policy judgement: chronological listings, explanations where decree titles are insufficient, and a dated survey of regulated prices. He especially welcomes an appendix documenting wartime economic organizations—their purposes, internal arrangements, capital and, occasionally, financial results. The review offers a compact view of what Lederer valued in economic documentation: not merely a register of rules, but accessible information about the bodies administering the wartime economy.

Technique is never self-legitimating: it is a means, and its social form depends on the purposes that command it. That claim organizes this expanded 1918 essay, which runs from prehistoric tool use to modern industry and the cultural crisis of efficiency. Schwiedland distinguishes older empirical craft from scientific technique — mastery of nature attained through knowledge — and, borrowing Sombart's stages, shows how inherited recipes are reorganized by experiment and systematic control of forces. Within the firm the technician is the oarsman, the economist the helmsman: the best process counts for nothing unless it can be financed, sold, and scaled. The century's real engine, he argues, was not sudden genius but cheaper transport and wider markets, which made every technical advantage urgent. Efficiency thus develops its own technique and comes to dominate — a rule before which culture must assert itself.

Kultur ist Selbstentfaltung und Beherrschung der Umwelt.

English translation: “Culture is self-unfolding and mastery of the environment.”

How can dearer fodder explain both falling cattle prices and rising pork prices? Karl Schlesinger makes this puzzle in wartime price analysis a test of what counts as a causal explanation in economic history. In this 1917 article, he argues that listing costs, supplies, and demand is not enough: historians must establish how these factors interact and when their effects occur. His defence of deduction rests on observed economic behaviour, not on premises insulated from experience. Yet theory is no finished toolkit: historical inquiry must help it account for adjustment over time, intervention, and monopoly. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish competing explanations of the same evidence—and shows why a change in causal ordering can change a prediction.

Behind the wartime surge in prices, Rosenberg locates not scarcity, speculation, or blocked imports but the money itself — the mass issue of irredeemable paper with which governments financed the war. Drawing the quantity theory from Bodin, Locke, Hume, Ricardo, Mill, and Fisher, and setting Menger's account of money as a generally accepted medium of exchange against Knapp's state theory, he assembles the cautionary record: Austrian paper money, the French assignats, and Confederate currency, all ending in depreciation. His sharpest pages are distributional. Inflation quietly plunders the holders of fixed money claims — bondholders, savers, pensioners, widows and orphans bound by trust funds — while enriching debtors and owners of real assets, and the law, honoring nominal value, offers the dispossessed creditor no remedy at all.

Die Rechtswissenschaft läßt hier die Gläubiger vollständig im Stiche.

English translation: “Jurisprudence here leaves creditors entirely in the lurch.”

A fixed bread price can conceal worsening scarcity, poorer flour, and a household forced to eat differently. In this 1917 article, Karl Pribram asks what food-price statistics can actually tell us when war transforms both markets and the goods being measured. Comparing chiefly Germany and Austria, he combines evidence of steep inflation with scrutiny of official ceilings, rationing, and the widening margins between grain, flour, and bread. His distinctive concern is that regulation changes not only prices but their meaning as evidence: an administered quotation cannot simply continue a free-market series. Readers can discover why a fixed basket may cease to describe household expenditure, and why, in Pribram’s account, effective price policy must reach the linked stages of production and trade rather than stop at the shop counter.

Either a theory of money folds into the general theory of exchange, or it explains nothing—this is the fault line Mises draws between catallactic and acatallactic doctrines. Acatallactic theories ground money in metal, in state command, or in analogies to blood, language, and law; catallactic theories integrate it into price formation and subjective value. From that standpoint he prosecutes Knapp's state theory of money for producing formal histories of laws and decrees while saying nothing of purchasing power, wages, or prices. He corrects the polemical label metallism, denying that Smith and Ricardo were naive metallists—Smith defended replacing gold with paper, Ricardo proposed removing coin from domestic circulation—and faults Wieser and Philippovich for absorbing Knapp's errors into the history of monetary thought.

Eine bis zu Ende gedachte Geldtheorie muß in eine Verkehrstheorie münden, sie hört damit auf akatallaktisch zu sein.

English translation: “A monetary theory thought through to the end must issue in a theory of exchange; therewith it ceases to be acatallactic.”

Can a wealth levy allow deductions and exemptions without inviting fraud or sacrificing substantial revenue? In this brief intervention in the 1918 proceedings on German financial reorganisation, Felix Somary offers concrete answers: deductible shareholdings should be traceable to approved depositaries on a fixed date, while municipal and charitable wealth should be exempt. His distinction is precise: exempting municipalities need not shield their shareholdings from the indirect effects of a levy on companies. The contribution shows how Somary separates enforceability from the scope of taxation—and why he rejects the 1913 defence contribution as a reliable measure of current revenue potential, without supplying a new calculation.

Strong fiscal powers need not mean state ownership of businesses: that distinction drives Felix Somary’s brief intervention in the 1918 committee discussion on German public finance. Defending a one-time wealth levy, he argues that the threat of state acquisition would induce landowners to declare realistic values, while a first-ranking land charge would spare the Reich an unwieldy collection apparatus. Yet he firmly rejects state participation in individual enterprises, proposing bond financing instead. The interest of this exchange lies in the practical tensions Somary accepts: accurate valuation secured by coercion, public priority at existing creditors’ expense, and immediate tax payment funded by long-term private debt. Readers encounter a sharply defined attempt to separate the state’s power to collect wealth from its power to control businesses.

When should difficulty turning business wealth into cash justify delaying a wealth levy? In this brief intervention in the 1918 committee discussion, Felix Somary treats illiquidity as a specific financial problem rather than a blanket objection to taxation. He proposes secured industrial-bank bonds, citing Austrian practice, but allows payment in installments for businesses such as publishers, small shops, cafés, and restaurants whose assets resist ready capitalization. Even there, earnings-based valuation or a subsequent sale could establish a taxable amount. The interest lies in Somary’s precise boundary between assets that financial institutions can mobilize and those that warrant time to pay: a compact example of how a tax proposal must accommodate the different forms in which business wealth is held.

A sudden fall in prices might be less damaging to investment than years of gradual decline: this is Felix Somary’s counterintuitive contention in his brief 1918 discussion intervention on a one-time wealth levy. His reasoning turns on concrete wartime conditions—depleted inventories and limited trade credit—which, he argues, would reduce the immediate danger of bankruptcies after peace, while prolonged uncertainty would discourage investment and repeated wage cuts would sustain social conflict. Somary assesses the levy not simply as a charge on accumulated wealth, but through its possible effects on export competitiveness and the Reichsbank’s capacity to conduct discount policy. This complete contribution from the proceedings offers a compact encounter with an economist weighing fiscal reconstruction by its consequences for productive recovery, rather than by the distribution of the tax burden alone.

Should a wealth levy fall on companies or on their shareholders? In this brief intervention in the 1918 proceedings on reorganising German public finance, Felix Somary makes the choice of taxpayer a question of both administrative feasibility and fairness. Insisting that double taxation must be avoided, he favours assessing companies: they can be identified more readily and comprehensively, whereas assessments of individual shareholders would depend on stock-market prices at selected dates. His remarks offer a compact view of how valuation methods shape tax equity, without pretending that company taxation is free of difficulties.

War has already destroyed wealth; should postwar taxation acknowledge that loss at once or distribute it through permanent charges? In this complete discussion intervention from 1918, Felix Somary defends a one-time wealth levy by exposing the fragility beneath apparently abundant bank deposits and war bonds. Banks, he argues, cannot supply liquidity independently when their assets are chiefly claims on an overburdened state. His distinctive case links private credit to public solvency: accepting a defined capital loss could restore confidence more effectively than preserving nominal fortunes while leaving fiscal obligations unresolved. Responses to objections about mortgages, foreign investors and capital flight show where this proposal encounters practical resistance—and how much its feasibility depends on a brief postwar window for implementation.