The archive.

A new tax can reduce one lender’s burden while increasing another’s: the difference lies in what was actually collected before. This problem anchors Frank Albert Fetter’s assessment of New York’s 1905 tax changes, adopted as expanding public commitments strained revenues and the state moved away from general property taxation. Fetter tests warnings of financial disruption against early stock-market evidence and examines mortgage taxation through uneven enforcement, local lending conditions, and the possible movement of capital. His discussion of special-franchise litigation adds another distinction: statutory authority does not itself secure collectible revenue. This compact article offers a concrete account of why a tax’s stated rate cannot settle who pays, and why its economic effects must be judged against existing practice rather than an imagined uniform system.

An unchanged tax rate can conceal a decisive change in burden. In this 1906 journal article, Frank Albert Fetter examines New York’s replacement of an annual half-percent mortgage levy with a one-time recording charge. He distinguishes practical relief from sound tax policy: the new charge costs less, but retains what he regards as the conceptual defect of taxing paper claims on income. His account connects legislative pressure with delayed payments, divergent interests among lenders, and evidence that even widely evaded taxes can raise borrowers’ interest rates. Readers can discover why weak initial receipts did not necessarily mean a tax was uncollectible—and why repeal attracted opponents anxious to act before government became dependent on its revenue.

The recording tax is qualitatively as bad as the annual tax, but imposes a very much lighter burden.

Can an economics defined by money prices explain valuation—or judge the social worth of private wealth? In this 1914 review of Herbert Joseph Davenport’s The Economics of Enterprise, Frank Albert Fetter welcomes a value-based account of capital but disputes the limits Davenport places on economic inquiry. His sharpest tests are concrete: debts do not themselves create lendable resources, and doubling physical output does not explain interest if prices must also adjust. Writing from the psychological approach to value, Fetter asks what monetary transactions presuppose about choices and future returns. His disagreement also reaches property: he accepts that private gain can diverge from public welfare without accepting Davenport’s sweeping condemnation. The review shows how shared theoretical premises can lead to conflicting explanations of interest and standards of social criticism.

When does disagreement with an economic theory become misrepresentation of it? In this 1916 rejoinder to H. J. Davenport’s review of Economic Principles, Frank Albert Fetter makes definitions and the sequence of exposition tests of fair criticism. He argues that Davenport confuses subjective value with commercial price, mistakes reported business usage for theoretical endorsement, and treats preliminary discussions of time-preference as a finished account of loan interest. These objections offer a concrete view of Fetter’s effort to distinguish individual valuation from market transactions. The reply also exposes a tension in scholarly polemic: Fetter demands patient, contextual reading while answering his critic with pointed sarcasm. Readers can examine how conceptual disputes become disputes over what an author has actually said.

Where does one seller’s market end and another’s begin? In this theoretical article, Frank Albert Fetter makes the boundary depend on prices as well as distance: customers compare the cost of goods delivered, not simply proximity to a trading centre. For homogeneous goods, with freight proportional to distance and transport following straight routes, he derives a hyperbolic boundary that shifts as relative prices change. The practical force of this geometry emerges in his criticism of shipment statistics: drawing an arbitrary district can manufacture an apparent shortage and support a misleading pricing argument. Readers can discover how transport costs protect local sellers, how lower prices enlarge their territories, and why an elegant spatial model must remain a first approximation when confronted with actual freight schedules and geography.

By the 1880s American economics had broken from English classical laissez-faire, and this survey—Fetter's contribution to a German comparative handbook, read here in that German translation—maps what grew in its place. He tells how German-trained scholars like Ely and Clark founded the American Economic Association, how Simon Patten's emphasis on consumption and psychology prepared the ground, and why Austrian marginal utility found unusually fertile soil in a country already reading Jevons and J. B. Clark. Fetter defends the 'psychological school' as a shift of interest from the outer physical world to human wants and valuations, blames the mistranslation of Nutzen as 'utility' for false charges of Benthamite hedonism, and answers Veblen and the institutionalists of The Trend of Economics before laying out ten trends he expects American theory to pursue.

Über die Unwirklichkeit des „homo oeconomicus“ wird nicht länger disputiert und es wird eingesehen, daß die ökonomischen Motive ihre Quellen in allen Bereichen des menschlichen Lebens haben können.

English translation: “The unreality of the "homo oeconomicus" is no longer disputed, and it is recognized that economic motives may have their sources in all spheres of human life.”

An economist’s defence of a tradition can help undo it. In this brief biographical encyclopedia entry, supplied in its 1937 republication, Frank Albert Fetter assesses John Elliot Cairnes as both an influential public writer and an uncertain guardian of classical economics. Cairnes sought to defend Ricardo and Mill against Jevons; Fetter argues that his amendments instead weakened the doctrines he meant to preserve. The sharpest contrast concerns method: Cairnes advocated abstract deduction, yet Fetter finds his strongest work in historical explanation and empirical studies, including The Slave Power and essays on Australian gold. The entry offers a compact, pointed distinction between Cairnes’ contemporary authority and the theoretical achievements Fetter was prepared to credit.

A landowner could raise money by selling a perpetual claim on landed income without promising ever to repay the capital. That distinction anchors Frank Albert Fetter’s brief encyclopedia entry: the rent charge served purposes similar to borrowing, yet escaped the church’s disapproval of ordinary interest-bearing loans. Fetter approaches this medieval legal instrument through the economics of investment, comparing the exchange of fixed incomes for capital sums to a modern bond market. His account makes clear why the absence of a maturity date mattered—not merely as a contractual detail, but as a basis for distinguishing the transaction’s ethical status. Readers gain a compact explanation of how landowners’ need for funds and burghers’ demand for investments met within religious constraints.

Does industrial monopoly follow inevitably from efficient production, or from legal arrangements and deliberate attempts to control prices? In this 1937 review of Arthur Robert Burns’s The Decline of Competition, Frank Albert Fetter tests the claim of inevitability against Burns’s own evidence. His crucial distinction is between a large, efficient plant and a firm that acquires many plants to gain market power: financial concentration need not improve production. Fetter values Burns’s account of industrial practices but challenges the move from documenting monopoly to accepting it as unavoidable. His criticism sharpens when Burns proposes state control: why should officials deemed unable to preserve competition prove capable of administering concentrated industry? The review connects precise questions of industrial organization with the competence and accountability of economic government.

Does steel production make monopoly inevitable, or do pricing rules help create the concentration they are invoked to justify? In this 1937 review essay, Frank Albert Fetter challenges the defense of basing-point pricing advanced in The Economics of the Iron and Steel Industry. He distinguishes large producing plants from corporations controlling many plants, and investors’ hopes of recovering costs from rights to protected returns. His case for mill-base pricing rests not on perfect competition but on weakening discrimination and centralized price control. Especially pointed is his treatment of investment losses: established firms’ objections to reform leave unheard the businesses already displaced or prevented from forming. The essay offers a concrete way to examine the passage from explaining industrial concentration to defending it as necessary.

Clearly it is not overhead costs but monopoly that permits fixing prices to realize overhead costs.

Economic freedom can be threatened by private concentration as well as state planning: this is the tension Frank Albert Fetter draws out in his 1943 review of Wilhelm Röpke’s Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart. Fetter clarifies Röpke’s elusive diagnosis of social disintegration as a change in structure—the replacement of independent proprietors by employees dependent on large aggregations of capital. His sympathy for this constructive liberalism does not prevent him from questioning Röpke’s idealization of the eighteenth century or his estimate of modern technology. This brief review offers a sharply defined encounter between liberal commitments and the problem of business scale, with Fetter weighing economic independence and human worth against both concentrated power and nostalgia for smaller enterprise.

Bureaucracy is a symptom, not the underlying evil: this distinction anchors Frank Albert Fetter’s 1945 review of Ludwig von Mises’s book. Fetter locates its real target in the transfer of decisions about prices and production from private enterprise to government. His distinctive contribution is to connect that argument to an older dispute over price theory, presenting Austrian subjective valuation as a basis for consumer sovereignty and political liberalism. Yet his endorsement has limits: he questions whether Mises sufficiently distinguishes bureaucratic administration from the system it serves, and whether capitalism deserves so much credit for scientific and cultural progress. This brief review shows where a sympathetic defender of free enterprise qualifies Mises’s claims—and why Fetter does not read the book as a demand for unrestricted laissez-faire.