The archive.

How could central banks defend gold-based currencies while easing a credit crisis? In this 1933 article, Richard Kerschagl examines the Lima conference’s answers through the practical tensions between reserve security, emergency lending, and foreign debt. He stresses that longer credit maturities and exceptional rediscounts came with collateral requirements and stronger central-bank supervision—not an unrestricted licence to expand credit. His account also preserves disagreements over exchange controls, relating Colombia’s defence of gold-flow restrictions to its particular economic circumstances. Most sharply, he reads the debt resolutions as acknowledging a choice of monetary stability over international credit standing. Readers encounter both Kerschagl’s commitment to gold and his guarded hope that cooperation among central banks could give inter-American integration a practical foothold.

Would restoring silver to monetary use revive trade—or chiefly rescue its producers and holders? Writing in 1933, Richard Kerschagl separates currency stability from support for a falling commodity price. His distinctive approach brings monetary institutions into contact with the stubborn economics of silver: much is mined as a by-product, while private hoards can return to market precisely when higher prices are meant to restore confidence. Giving competing reform proposals substantial space, he tests their promises against these constraints and the needs of silver-using economies. Readers can discover why credit expansion need not require silver, why official stock agreements cannot control private selling, and why Kerschagl objects to imposing obsolete monetary arrangements on Asian borrowers in the name of assistance.

Marxism stands or falls with its theory of value—and by that measure, this 1933 polemic sets out to demolish it. Presenting Marx largely in his own words before turning to a factual but uncompromising critique, Kerschagl reverses the Marxian causal order: labor does not create value; labor is undertaken because a purposively valued good is sought. Socially necessary labor time becomes a fiction unable to compare heterogeneous work or accommodate scarcity and demand, while the money chapter convicts Marx of a crude metallism blind to credit and purchasing power. The book's sharpest thrust is the calculation argument—by admitting only one factor of production, Marxism destroys the very measures a planned economy would need to know which processes waste labor and capital. Class struggle, he concludes, dissolves nation, law, and religion into organized antagonism.

Geldschöpfung, Angebot und Nachfrage, Marktprobleme existieren für Marx überhaupt nicht.

English translation: “Money creation, supply and demand, market problems simply do not exist for Marx.”

What protection does a gold clause offer when the law permits repayment in depreciated paper money? Richard Kerschagl’s comparative article examines the gap between a creditor’s contractual security and the payment actually obtainable in Austria, Poland, and Hungary. His distinctive focus is on the machinery behind the promise: whether a debt requires delivery of foreign currency or merely uses it as a measure of value, whose monetary law applies, and which exchange rate counts. Austria’s partial settlement, Poland’s promotion of zloty contracts, and Hungary’s official equation of gold with paper expose different allocations of depreciation risk. Kerschagl is especially critical of Hungarian safeguards that preserve gold value in name without recognizing market exchange rates. The comparison shows why stronger contractual wording need not produce stronger economic protection.

Public finance, on this account, is an economic science of the state rather than a technical appendix to tax law—and a theory of taxation that does not begin from the state, Kerschagl writes, is nonsense. His Steuerlehre reads economy, law, coercion, and political purpose together, tracing modern taxation from older real, property, and consumption levies to the fragile arrival of income taxation, which interwar inflation and administrative weakness kept unstable. He dismantles equivalence and insurance theories that assimilate taxes to private exchange, insists that in principle every tax is shiftable, and rejects the tidy contrast between direct and indirect taxes as an account of who ultimately pays. No ideal tax exists in the abstract; a workable system must fit production, property, and constitutional order, as his comparative surveys and Austria's 1934 financial constitution show.

Das Urteil über die Produktivität der Steuern ist in Wirklichkeit ein Urteil über die Produktivität des Staates.

English translation: “The judgment on the productivity of taxes is in reality a judgment on the productivity of the state.”

Read through the political vocabulary of the Fascist “new state,” Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo anno becomes, in this 1935 tract, the moral principle that saves a corporative order from mere statism. Kerschagl presents Italian fascism as the force that overcame liberal weakness and socialist disorder—liberalism having atomized society into isolated individuals, socialism having overrun weak parliaments—and reads the Lateran settlement as proof that Church and regime can coexist when neither encroaches on the other's sphere. Fascism is redefined as organization: hierarchy, vocational grouping, and service to the whole, with freedom relocated from liberal autonomy to ordered incorporation. The encyclical's contribution, he argues, is a regulative principle the market cannot supply—social justice and social charity—binding both laissez-faire capitalism and class socialism to moral law.

Es soll gezeigt werden, daß ein faschistisches Programm ganz dem Geiste der großen Enzyklika entsprechen kann.

English translation: “It shall be shown that a Fascist program can fully correspond to the spirit of the great encyclical.”

Kerschagl's 1938 inaugural lecture surveys Austria's contribution to modern economics as both doctrinal history and methodological self-portrait, and its verdict is pointed: scientific economics on Austrian soil begins not with cameralism or mercantilism but with the marginal-utility school. Menger supplies the foundations of subjective value and imputation; Böhm-Bawerk extends them into capital, interest, and taxation; Wieser gives the theory a broader social cast—before Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, Morgenstern, and Haberler enlarge the field. What unites them, he argues, is not uniform doctrine but an elastic analytical core, and he plays down the Methodenstreit with the German historical school as an exaggerated quarrel. Universalist organic economics, associated with Spann, earns cautious respect: valuable for recalling economists to society, but unable to replace causal explanation with metaphysical totality.

Die Ökonomie kann daher auch selbstverständlich keine größere Sicherheit bieten, als eben die beschränkte der Erfahrung selbst.

English translation: “Economics can therefore of course offer no greater certainty than the limited certainty of experience itself.”

The social Wunschbild, the anticipatory image of what economy and society ought to become, is treated in this 1947 rectoral address as an active economic factor rather than escapist fantasy. Because all economic processes take shape from the willing of living human beings, Kerschagl argues, economics cannot be a mechanics of things; yesterday's utopia may become today's reality, even as fulfilled ideals cease to press as ideals. He reads mercantilism, physiocracy, classical economics, Marxism, and the Austrian marginalists as mixtures of contradictory wishes, each torn between freedom and binding order—a plurality that turns destructive whenever one doctrine is enforced as total truth. Applied to postwar Austrian policy the thesis is austere: distribution can complement production but never replace it, and social aims must be judged by persuasion and human dignity, not coercion.

Es kann auf die Dauer nur das verteilt werden, was erarbeitet ist, und alle Verteilungssysteme können nur eine wichtige und notwendige Ergänzung der Erzeugung, aber kein Ersatz für diese selbst sein.

English translation: “In the long run only what has been produced by labor can be distributed, and all systems of distribution can only be an important and necessary complement to production, but never a substitute for it.”

Money has no essence independent of its economic order; it is a creature of a particular economic form, and once that order changes so does money itself. From the wartime and postwar experience of rationing, blocked balances, black markets, and administrative allocation, Kerschagl rereads the classic problems—deposits and credit creation, quantity theory, exchange rates, gold, inflation, currency reform—around a single insight: legal payment power and general purchasing power can come apart. Ration cards, coupons, price controls, and occupational privileges shift access to goods from money toward administrative entitlement, so that identical nominal incomes carry unequal real content. Planning alters money qualitatively, personalizing it until, at the limit of full socialism, it decays into a mere Rechenpfennig. Sound policy, he insists, demands clarity in the creation of money and truth in monetary accounting.

Jede Planwirtschaft — und dabei muß es sich noch keineswegs etwa um eine vollsozialisierte Wirtschaft handeln — ändert sofort grundlegend den Charakter des Geldes.

English translation: “Every planned economy — and this need not by any means be a fully socialized economy — immediately alters the character of money in a fundamental way.”

Why does a state that owns enterprises and controls prices still need taxes? Richard Kerschagl’s 1949 article makes this question central to a comparison of American and Soviet public finance. He distinguishes the outward form of a tax from its function within a particular system of ownership and government. American federal, state, and municipal authorities compete over overlapping tax bases; Soviet authorities use taxes to absorb enterprise surpluses, differentiate among ownership sectors, and preserve incentives for skilled work. Kerschagl argues that recognizable fiscal techniques can serve sharply different political and distributive purposes. The comparison gives readers concrete grounds for understanding why progressive income taxes or turnover levies cannot be interpreted apart from price controls, production costs, and the allocation of governmental power.

What does practically effective economic training lose when specialization separates it from broader theoretical inquiry? In this 1952 study, Richard Kerschagl connects American university organization with the economics and business administration taught within it. Drawing on teaching experience and conversations with economists, he examines how departmental boundaries, case instruction, and well-funded research shape scholarly priorities. His continental European perspective is explicit: admiration for Mises and methodological breadth informs his criticism of theoretical fragmentation, yet he credits American mathematical methods and specialized research with genuine achievements. The comparison offers readers a concrete account of the institutional conditions behind intellectual differences—and a reciprocal prescription: Europeans need stronger mathematical training, while Americans need better access to European scholarship through languages and translation.

If the state owns productive enterprises, why does it still need an expanding tax apparatus? In this 1952 essay, Richard Kerschagl examines the gap between socialization’s promise of public revenue and its coexistence with heavy taxation. His distinctive concern is how to distinguish genuine enterprise earnings from returns manufactured through administered prices, subsidies, and accounting transfers. Administrative inertia explains part of the duplication; the harder problem, he argues, is verifying profitability when market prices no longer provide a reliable check. Kerschagl judges public ownership less by doctrine than by its capacity to sustain production and relieve fiscal burdens. The essay offers a concrete way to question apparent public-sector profits: do they represent additional resources, or merely money moved between the state’s own accounts?