1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Can scientific inquiry fix the natural height of prices? Working through the whole nineteenth-century apparatus—Hume, Smith, Ricardo, and Mill on labor; Hermann, Rau, and Roscher on the boundaries set by use value; and the reigning cost-of-production school—Komorzynski answers no. Labor theories confuse value-creating purposive activity with mere physical day-labor; boundary theories only enclose price between an upper and lower limit; and cost-of-production formulas are circular, because costs are themselves prices, and capital profit and rent cannot be determined without already knowing the whole price system. Joint production and common inputs, like gas and coke or wool and mutton, seal the case: since a good's contribution to human welfare cannot be measured from its physical properties, the title's question must be answered in the negative.
Wir werden demnach zu dem Ergebnisse gelangen, dass auf Grundlage der heutigen Forschung die wissenschaftliche Begründung der natürlichen Preisverhältnisse der Güter eine Unmöglichkeit ist.
English translation: “We shall accordingly reach the conclusion that, on the basis of present-day research, the scientific grounding of the natural price relations of goods is an impossibility.”
Setting exchange deliberately aside to observe what happens inside a single self-contained economy, this inquiry—dedicated to Carl Menger—seeks the root of value in the factual relation between scarce useful forces and recurring needs. Komorzynski develops a law of the continuity of needs and a 'steady state' of the stock of goods, then measures a force's economic significance by the permanent loss its disappearance would inflict on the least urgent satisfactions still secured. He credits Menger's marginal value theory with escaping the errors of the older German use-value school—concrete quantities, multiple needs, complementary production goods—yet faults it for leaving available quantities unexplained and for treating consumer and production goods inconsistently. Value, on his account, belongs only to continuously effective forces and always presupposes the economy's possible reorganization.
Das Product ist stets ungetheilt das Ergebnis der Wirksamkeit der aufgewandten Produktionsmittel.
English translation: “The product is always, undivided, the result of the joint action of the means of production employed.”
Marx promised in Capital's third volume to reconcile the labor theory of value with a fact that plainly contradicts it: profit rates tend to equalize across industries regardless of how much labor each employs, so that railways and labor-heavy workshops earn alike. That reconciliation, Komorzynski argues, is self-defeating. Once Marx converts values into 'prices of production'—cost price plus an average profit on total capital—labor value forfeits its real economic force, and with it collapses the exploitation theory that profit is appropriated unpaid labor. Drawing on Böhm-Bawerk's pearl-stringing and wine-cellar examples, he insists that products spring from nature and capital no less than labor, that scarce natural goods carry value without embodied labor, and that Sombart's rescue on grounds of 'social labor' cannot repair the doctrine.
Die Ausbeutungslehre steht und fällt mit der Arbeitswerttheorie.
English translation: “The doctrine of exploitation stands and falls with the labor theory of value.”
Komorzynski defines credit not as a loan of goods, nor of money, nor as mere trust or a time-separated exchange, but as Vermögensleihe—the lending of wealth itself, in which ownership of concrete goods passes to the borrower while the lender's wealth survives as a legally fixed claim yielding income. To ground this, the treatise, dedicated to Böhm-Bawerk, rebuilds the concepts of wealth, capital, and income from the foundation, treating wealth as the power to obtain recurring income and income as a primary concept rather than a circular 'return on wealth.' A second part turns to credit as a national-economic power—productive versus consumptive lending, the economic meaning of usury against the canonical prohibition, and how circulating claims, bills, and banknotes economize money and steady its value.
Credit und Tausch bilden zwei verschiedene eigenartige Gestaltungen dieses Verkehres.
English translation: “Credit and exchange constitute two different, distinctive forms of this intercourse.”