1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A tax that aims at a year's income faces a stubborn obstacle: the income cannot be known until the year has closed, by which time the taxpayer's ability to pay may already have changed. Meyer devotes this contribution to Austrian tax law and income theory to that temporal gap, dissecting the legal devices, prior-year assessment, three-year averaging, estimated current income, that substitute for the impossible simultaneity of income and tax. He is sharpest on the beginning and ending fragments of income, where sources that arise or cease mid-period escape or overpay tax, and he turns his critique against the Prussian source theory, which cannot handle successive income drawn from a single source. A redrafted paragraph 156 closes the argument, and behind it lies a claim about income's double meaning, whole and parts.
Die Identität des Wirtschaftsjahres und des Steuerjahres schwebt uns als kategorischer Imperativ vor.
English translation: “The identity of the economic year and the tax year stands before us as a categorical imperative.”
From the Dutch prohibitions on short-selling through England's Barnard's Act to the French campaigns against agiotage, the law has tried and failed for centuries to suppress speculative dealing on the exchanges. Rosenberg traces that comparative history to explain the German and Austrian 'gaming objection' — the doctrine, received into §764 of the new Civil Code, by which pure differential contracts settled only on price movements could be denied enforcement as mere wagers. He shows how the Reichsgericht and, more strictly, the Austrian Supreme Court inferred gambling intent from a speculator's wealth, occupation, and trading pattern, and dissects the 'pathological' commission agent who executes real trades yet hides the true price to skim a concealed cut. The doctrine, he concludes, is judicial self-defense that fails economically, and he ends by proposing to regulate commission houses instead.
Die Geschichte der die Börsengeschäfte betreffenden Gesetzgebung ist zugleich eine Geschichte der Nutzlosigkeit dieser Gesetze, soweit sie den Börsenverkehr beschränken wollten.
English translation: “The history of legislation concerning stock-exchange transactions is at the same time a history of the uselessness of these laws, insofar as they sought to restrict exchange dealings.”
In Prussia the income-tax reform of 1891 had uncovered unexpected reserves of taxable wealth; in Austria the first assessment of the new personal income tax merely met modest forecasts and fell short of every wider hope. Wieser's diagnosis is that the fault lies not in the tax but in its execution — administrative, statistical, and social. Visible urban incomes are reached while vast portions of rural and especially agricultural income escape, because officials and farmers alike confuse the income tax with the old cadastral land tax. Measuring Austria against the poorer eastern provinces of Prussia, he estimates that hundreds of thousands of rural taxpayers went unassessed and that honest valuation would have yielded far more. Conceived justly, he concludes, the tax is only half just — half unjust in execution — and falls hardest on the open, compliant urban taxpayer.
In Österreich ist das Ergebnis der neuen Personal-Einkommensteuer eine Enttäuschung.
English translation: “In Austria, the results of the new personal income tax are a disappointment.”
Bostedo had claimed that saving, as commonly understood, has no influence whatever on the formation of capital; this reply, read here in an English rendering of Böhm-Bawerk's 1901 text whose German original remains unidentified, sets out to show why the denial mistakes money phenomena for real industrial relations. Saving, he argues, has two sides rather than two meanings: the negative act of not consuming, and the positive consequence as banks channel deposits into mortgages, railroads, factories, and machines. Against Bostedo's claim that universal thrift must contract production, Böhm-Bawerk insists that a fall in present consumption is not a fall in production generally, only a shift of demand from immediate enjoyment toward capital goods and longer, roundabout processes. Deferred consumption, illustrated by Crusoe's stored provisions and by the law of large numbers, becomes the capital structure through which later enjoyment is made possible.
I simply direct attention to the other side of the process, to the positive consequences of the negative first step, which is the not-consuming.
In Victoria and New Zealand, colonies Schwiedland reads as freer than Britain from aristocratic ballast and therefore bolder in social experiment, a new type of wage rule was taking shape against the sweated trades. Victoria's wage boards delegate rate-setting to expert representatives of employers and workers under an impartial chairman; New Zealand instead channels disputes into compulsory conciliation and binding arbitration awards. Neither, he insists, sprang from abstract formulas of a living or family wage, but from concrete trade practice, often union standards. Evasion through double books and collusive underpayment does not refute the system; it proves that law needs organized labour behind it. The result is neither old maximum-wage policing nor doctrinaire socialism, but an authoritative lower boundary governed by Billigkeit, a public standard of fairness.
Dabei wetteifern beide Gebiete miteinander im socialpolitischen Fortschritt. Dessen höchste Blüte bilden derzeit die Maßnahmen zur Erhöhung unzureichender Löhne.
English translation: “Both regions vie with each other in socio-political progress. Its highest flowering at present consists in measures for raising insufficient wages.”
In a cramped Viennese cellar where piece-cutters sew eighteen hours a day and pawn their tools to survive, the old song still promises that the craftsman's trade has a golden foundation. The four acts turn that proverb bitterly ironic: the honest tailor Peter Wimmer rises to master only to risk becoming an exploiter himself, while the opportunist Tichtl climbs by discarding the mother of his child and preying on Wimmer's daughter Leni. When a murder is pinned on Tichtl, Wimmer is tempted to let a hated enemy hang for it. Twice forbidden the Vienna stage by the Statthalterei on grounds a review called plainly political, the Volksstück drew comparison with Hauptmann's Die Weber for its portrait of small craftsmen crushed by large capital.
I Stukschneider — dös is der noblichste Mensch von der Welt, a Heiliger, sag’ i Ihnen. Denn er lebt nur für Andere und für sich selber stirbt er.
English translation: “A piece-cutter — that's the noblest fellow in the world, a saint, I tell you. For he lives only for others, and for himself he dies.”
Along the San River the Roman Catholic Polish west met the Greek Catholic Ruthenian east, and across both stretched a peasantry that eighteenth-century jurists could equate with slavery. Mises's first book, written in Karl Grünberg's Vienna seminar, traces the lord-peasant relationship in Galicia from the Austrian annexation of 1772 to the abolition of robot in 1848. It follows the province through Joseph II's abolition of personal serfdom, the Robot Patent of 1786, the Raab colonization schemes, the massacres of the 1846 uprising, and the final Grundentlastung forced by the revolution of March 1848. Drawing on ministerial and Hofkammer archives, it argues that serfdom and corvée vanished not because they offended natural law but because they no longer fit the modern economic order.
Der polnische Privatbauer des 18. Jahrhunderts ist leibeigen.
English translation: “The Polish private peasant of the 18th century is a serf.”
The 1896 Vienna enquiry into women's labour filled seven hundred printed pages, stirred the press and public, then dispersed without producing a single practical measure. Sympathy, Schwiedland argues, was never the point: the distress of seamstresses and home workers stands in causal connection with their lack of organization, and the hardest case is the trade that is almost wholly female and dispersed across private dwellings. Marriage expectations, domestic burden, mistrust, replaceability, and dependence on a husband's wage all weaken association at the very moment they depress pay. His remedy is a hybrid of law, compulsory or state-aided representation understood as education, and the Berlin Christian-social Gewerkverein as a model in which bourgeois women initiate a union and then withdraw, culminating, where a sales cooperative bypasses the Verleger, in structural change.
Da frägt sie nur um den Auftrag, nicht mehr um dessen Preis.
English translation: “There she asks only about the commission, no longer about its price.”
Two problems frame Wieser's 1902 lecture to the Society of Austrian Economists, delivered after the finance minister confessed that the tax reform of 1896 had stopped halfway down the road. Can the personal income tax grow into Austria's principal direct tax, as it already is in Prussia, where it raises three-quarters of direct revenue while in Austria it remains a mere supplement? Not yet, he answers: assessment still misses perhaps a third of taxable income, above all agricultural income, so abolishing the old yield taxes would violently shift burdens from land to city and toward Vienna. The land tax must therefore stand until income assessment becomes honest. Turning to the antiquated Ertragsteuern — emergency war taxes bent by excessive rates into a regressive muddle — he insists on separating capital, a common productive tool, from the capitalists who draw income from it.
Alles eher als ein System von Steuern.
English translation: “Anything but a system of taxes.”
The state, in this 1902 lecture to the Gewerbeverein, is no fixed machine standing above society but the highest form of human association, itself in constant movement because it springs from human nature. Social policy, Inama-Sternegg argues, must therefore begin from concrete observation — population, institutions, associations, parties, public moods — yet cannot be made scientific by measurement alone: where exact mass observation fails, the statesman's intuitive, historically trained judgment must take its place. Society is not passive material but a field of organized forces with their own pressure and inertia. Modern life, he insists, has outgrown individualist assumptions; transport, cartels, unions, and class consciousness demand a collectivist orientation. Politics becomes applied social ethics — cultivating associations, decentralization, and self-government while subordinating parties themselves to the state as the highest cultural and moral value.
So bilden diese sozialen Massen immer auch Schranken der Politik, über die kein Staatsmann sich ungestraft hinwegsehen kann.
English translation: “Thus these social masses always constitute limits upon politics as well, which no statesman can disregard with impunity.”
No departmental bureau can grasp the interdependence of population, occupation, production, household, welfare, and mobility, which is why Inama-Sternegg insists that labor statistics be built into the whole apparatus of central state statistics rather than hived off as a specialty. Because class cuts across every demographic and occupational group, it cannot serve as the highest principle of classification; social position within occupation must instead be registered consistently throughout. The object, he stresses, is not labor as a productive force to be ranked beside the machine, but the life-condition of the working man as an ethical being and full member of society. The census is foundational; population-movement data and the Betriebszählung, tied to the occupational census, supply the dynamic and institutional complements. Against inflated hopes for a special labor office wielding executive power, he offers a disciplined middle position.
Mit Enqueten kann man eben nicht Statistik machen.
English translation: “One simply cannot produce statistics by means of inquiries.”
The crash of 1873 and the Austrian parliamentary debates it provoked supply the raw material for this legal-economic essay, reprinted in 1903 from an 1874 original, which turns scattered political claims about crisis relief into a theory of public law. The question is not whether state aid is expedient but when it is legally justified, required, and bounded — for even legislative power, Inama-Sternegg insists, is no absolute will. Against both laissez-faire self-responsibility and socialist demand, he grounds intervention in the 'modern state' as a cultural and legal organism: aid is lawful when crisis disables the real exercise of economic freedom, and its purpose is to restore private agency, not replace it. His distinctive move makes organized self-help the state's first task — regaining freedom, not merely protecting it — with direct monetary aid permitted but secondary and situational.
Der Staat ist nicht nur der Lückenbüßer der Gesellschaft.
English translation: “The State is not merely society's stopgap.”