3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Consumers never merely weigh today's helping of a good against tomorrow's; they confront recurring subsistence needs, postponable wishes, durable purchases, future-only aims, and precautionary reserves. On that typological insight Mahr rebuilds the theory of intertemporal choice, which he judges to have sought one general law where none exists. Present restraint, he shows, is undertaken not to enjoy the same want more intensely later but to fund a different project altogether—dissolving Böhm-Bawerk's doctrine of systematically undervalued future goods; where earlier satisfaction is genuinely preferred, the cause is stronger anticipatory pleasure, not faulty foresight. Interest therefore cannot rest on a universal discounting of the future, and long-term rationality can be judged only by the tendencies discernible when the decision was made, never by its later outcome.
Die Regel ist, daß Einschränkungen an der gegenwärtigen Bedürfnisbefriedigung nur vorgenommen werden, um in der Zukunft neue, anders geartete Bedürfnisse befriedigen zu können.
English translation: “The rule is that restrictions on present want-satisfaction are undertaken only in order to be able to satisfy new, differently constituted wants in the future.”
'Collective needs' ranks among the most contested terms in the theory of public finance, and Mahr sets out to demystify it. He rejects in turn the organic fiction of a state that feels its own wants, Sax's individualist account of socially conditioned needs, and the circular definition that identifies collective needs with whatever the public authorities happen to provide. The deeper trouble lies in the word 'need' itself, a hedonistic residue he would replace with 'goals.' Only internal legal protection and external security appear intrinsically tied to the state; beyond that minimum, the scope of public activity is not deduced from any natural class of wants but set by whichever part of the population holds political power. Scarcity stays economic; the allocation of public purposes is political.
Kollektivziele sind demnach die Ziele, welche jener Teil der Bevölkerung, der die politische Macht innehat, für die staatliche Tätigkeit festgelegt hat.
English translation: “Collective goals are accordingly the goals which that part of the population which holds political power has set for state activity.”
No concept in economic theory, Mahr observes, has been defined in more diverse ways than capital—and much theoretical confusion follows from treating heterogeneous objects and markets as one. He holds real capital and money capital to be two aspects of a single phenomenon, and separates capital in the national-economic sense from private wealth that merely yields income: consumer loans, resold securities, and land purchases may enrich an owner without adding to social productive capacity. The fiction of a single market and a single interest rate dissolves into a short-term money market and a long-term investment market that communicate only imperfectly, their rate differences sustained by liquidity, cycle, and institutional constraint. Interest, finally, is neither a reward for saving nor a mere liquidity premium but an investment premium that restrains hoarding and keeps funds flowing to productive capital.
Der Zins ist weder eine Prämie für das Sparen, noch wird er als Illiquiditätsprämie ausreichend charakterisiert. Er ist vielmehr als Investitionsprämie zu bezeichnen.
English translation: “Interest is neither a premium for saving, nor is it adequately characterized as a liquidity premium. Rather, it is to be designated as an investment premium.”
Multiplier theory, as Keynes bequeathed it, sums an endless sequence of income effects without ever fixing the accounting period national income actually requires—and for Mahr the neglect of the time factor is its cardinal defect. Since income is reckoned by the year, the multiplier too must be annual: he redefines it as the coefficient linking a rise in circulating money to the rise in monetary national income, and identifies it with the marginal velocity of circulation, the number of income-forming turnovers a newly issued unit performs within the year. Hoarding, on this account, is not an external leakage but a lowering of that average velocity. The Keynesian investment multiplier and the export multiplier become mere special cases of a broader principle: supplying a growing economy with means of payment. Marked here as previously unpublished.
Der entscheidende Mangel der herrschenden Multiplikatortheorie liegt in der Vernachlässigung des Zeitfaktors.
English translation: “The decisive defect of the prevailing multiplier theory lies in the neglect of the time factor.”