1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
When Austria-Hungary debated exchanging its silver gulden for gold, Markus Ettinger — dedicating his study to Carl Menger — warned that no monetary reform is ever merely technical. Fix the gold gulden too high, or let gold keep appreciating, and reform becomes a hidden tax levied on producers, debtors, workers, and the state for the benefit of creditors and secure capital. His argument turns on an asymmetry: wholesale and export prices fall quickly under dearer money because world competition forces them down, while rents, food, and shop prices stay sticky, so cheaper commodities need not mean a cheaper life. Reversing the era's common view, he contends that silver had not fallen — gold had risen under swollen monetary demand — and that any just reform must preserve what the existing gulden actually buys at home.
Die Engrospreise passen sich an den steigenden Geldwert oder den schwereren Goldgulden an, indem sie entsprechend sinken, — die Consum- oder Detailpreise nicht.
English translation: “Wholesale prices adjust to the rising value of money, or to the heavier gold gulden, by falling accordingly — consumer or retail prices do not.”
A strike in Vienna's men's ready-made clothing trade in January 1903 becomes, in Ettinger's hands, a test case for the whole problem of home work and social reform. Starvation wages, tuberculosis, and overcrowded workrooms are read not as an isolated moral scandal but as symptoms of a structurally irrational market — a chain running from Konfektionäre through Stückmeister to dispersed Heimarbeiter, squeezed by export decline, customs burdens, and destructive underbidding. Against this he sets the enforceable minimum-wage tariff, backed by wage books, control commissions, and arbitration, citing Australia's statutory compulsion as the model that works. He defines home work economically rather than legally — labor done for another's account and risk, far below the general wage — and closes with a program of organized employers, organized workers, and public policy: not communism, not anarchism, but rationally organized individualism.
Von einer gelungenen Operation kann man nur sprechen, wenn der Patient bei derselben nicht stirbt.
English translation: “One can speak of a successful operation only if the patient does not die in the course of it.”
Modern competition, Ettinger contends, throws up the very associations meant to restrain it. Cartels are neither an invention of academic economists nor a creature of legislation, but practical answers to ruinous price wars, overproduction, and unstable relations among firms. With a foreword by Carl Menger, this legal-economic study refuses both a naive faith in laissez-faire and the reflex of treating every combination as criminal conspiracy. If private associations already regulate prices, output, and risk across whole branches, the state cannot pose as a neutral onlooker; it must decide how such power is supervised and where stabilizing coordination shades into private domination. Ettinger works through cartel forms as stages in an industry's self-organization — from loose price agreements, vulnerable to evasion, toward integrated cooperatives that turn rivalry into collective calculation — and supplies model statutes for the promoters and lawyers who would build them.
Dem Kartellprobleme kann und darf der Staat nicht länger als stiller Beobachter gegenüberstehen.
English translation: “The state can and must no longer stand before the cartel problem as a silent observer.”
Facing the fiscal wreckage of the coming peace, Ettinger attacks the fashionable remedy of a one-time capital levy: assessed at inflated wartime prices, it would mistake paper valuations for real wealth, drain working capital from firms, and drive weaker producers to the wall while the strong absorb them — accelerating the very concentration it claims to fight. Behind the confusion, he argues, lies the veil of the money economy, which hides the war's true shifts in property. His alternative is more discriminating: skim off the 'virtual' wealth that scarcity, inflation, and abnormal demand have created, and carry the transition on a general compulsory loan at four percent. Fiscal justice, on this account, must be bound to monetary analysis and to the survival of the producers on whom reconstruction depends.
Die Begriffsverwirrung entsteht nur aus dem Grunde, weil der Schleier der Geldwirtschaft den Blick für die wahren Verschiebungen im Besitze und die wirklichen Opfer des Krieges trübt.
English translation: “The conceptual confusion arises solely because the veil of the monetary economy clouds one's view of the true shifts in property and the real sacrifices of the war.”