Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk · 1887
Böhm-Bawerk’s brief review of O. Wachenhusen’s Neue Untersuchungen über Ursprung, Wesen und Fortbestand der Grundrente delivers a sharply adverse judgment through a compressed reconstruction of the book’s argument:
Ein recht gut gemeintes, aber im Ausgangspunkt, der Beweisführung und den Ergebnissen gleich verfehltes Buch.
English translation: A book very well meant, but equally mistaken in its point of departure, its demonstration, and its results.
The review moves from Wachenhusen’s opposition to Ricardo and rent income to his explanation of rent and proposed remedies. Wachenhusen argues that natural forces provide usefulness but possess no value; ground rent therefore cannot compensate their operation. Instead, he locates its sole cause in concentrated landed estates.
Bei wahrhaft freier Konkurrenz gelte nämlich das „Naturgesetz“, daß nicht der am ungünstigsten, sondern der am billigsten arbeitende Produzent den Marktpreis bestimme.
English translation: For under truly free competition there holds, he maintains, the "natural law" that it is not the producer working under the least favourable conditions, but the one producing most cheaply, who determines the market price.
This reported proposition supplies the hinge between price theory and institutional reform. If the cheapest producer determined agricultural prices, Wachenhusen contends, rent would disappear. Abolishing agricultural protective tariffs and permitting the freest disposal of land would supposedly achieve this without abolishing private landed property.
Böhm-Bawerk’s skeptical qualifications and ironic presentation of the promised universal happiness expose his rejection of that causal chain. Yet he ends by declining detailed criticism. The review’s significance lies in its compressed opposition to an explanation that makes rent a removable effect of obstructed competition; it does not develop an alternative theory or demonstrate each alleged error.
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