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Decades of failed attempts to replace Austria's obsolete Erwerbsteuer patent of 1812 and the provisional income-tax patent of 1849 came to rest in the reform law of 25 October 1896, which Reisch here presents alongside the smaller statutes that remained in force. More than a bare edition, it reconstructs legislative intent from the motives, committee reports, and Reichsrat speeches, tracing the abandoned Dunajewski project, Steinbach's 1892 bill, and the roles of Plener, Böhm-Bawerk, and Biliński. The commentary follows the law's architecture: the general Erwerbsteuer assessed by repartition among tax societies rather than numerical net yield, the new Rentensteuer on capital yields, and the modern personal income tax with its progressive scale, household aggregation, and safeguards for business secrecy — a foundational text of the modern Austrian tax state.
Mit aller Entschiedenheit stand für die Regierung das Eine fest, daß die bisherige Methode der Besteuerung nach dem ziffermäßigen Reinerträge hier zunächst nicht fortgesetzt werden dürfe.
English translation: “For the government one thing was firmly established with all decisiveness: that the previous method of taxation according to numerically determined net yield could not, for the time being, be continued here.”
Reisch trains his 1912 offprint on a narrow but consequential dispute: whether the Austrian state, now a vast industrial entrepreneur through its railways, mines, post, and monopolies, may keep accounts no private firm would tolerate. The quarrel between cameralistic and commercial bookkeeping, he argues, is not one of formal preference but of economic adequacy — cameralistics merely compares budget estimate to outturn and calls any overshoot a success, while commercial accounting measures whether wealth has been preserved or consumed. Fixing on the state railways' refusal to depreciate rolling stock, he shows how omitted depreciation manufactures fictional surpluses, inflates the buyout burden at nationalization, and lets the state consume its own capital unawares. His remedy: genuine asset accounting and enterprise balance sheets, with parliamentary budget rights left intact.
Die Insuffizienz des Vermögens gibt gewiß nicht das Recht, auf eine Verrechnung des Vermögens überhaupt zu verzichten!
English translation: “The insufficiency of assets certainly does not confer the right to dispense with the accounting of assets altogether!”
As the Habsburg monarchy dissolved into rival successor states, the new German-Austria faced a fiscal wreckage that Reisch likens to an earthquake-damaged building whose foundations — state credit and currency — must still bear the load. Financial policy, he insists, reaches far beyond the levying of taxes: honoring the war-loan Lombard promises would have calmed the panic, whereas the bank's passive resistance turned consolidated war debt back into dangerous floating note debt. He attacks the exaggerated fiscalism and 'tax-security psychosis' of the hour — the twelve percent default interest, the controls on correspondence and postal transfers — while conceding that some devaluation is unavoidable and that a fair one-time capital levy should wait until borders and currency are settled. His remedy is conservative surgery, not amputation.
Finanzpolitik darf sich keineswegs in Steuerpolitik erschöpfen.
English translation: “Financial policy must by no means exhaust itself in tax policy.”
Double-entry accounting, in the form Pacioli gave it, is for Reisch the enduring foundation of the discipline, even as the surrounding literature otherwise mirrors the broader course of economic development. He contrasts an older writing that explained bookkeeping to jurists and adapted it to new legal forms — joint-stock companies, cooperatives, limited-liability firms — with a newer one bent on modernization through machines, faster reporting, business administration, statistics, and operational control. This brief foreword praises the volume it introduces for surveying such proposed reforms systematically, while cautioning that only the passage of time will separate what proves lasting and useful from the pseudo-reforms of the moment.
So verbindet sich die Buchhaltung mit der Statistik und dient womöglich als Konjunkturenbarometer im kleinen, aus dessen Angaben dann die Konjunkturforschungsinstitute ihre großen Wetterberichte zusammenstellen können.
English translation: “Thus bookkeeping combines with statistics and possibly serves as a business-cycle barometer in miniature, from whose data the business-cycle research institutes can then compile their great weather reports.”
L. Albert Hahn's Volkswirtschaftliche Theorie des Bankkredits, revised for its third edition, made credit sovereign over money, savings, capital, interest, and the whole business cycle — and it is exactly that supremacy Reisch sets out to dismantle. Admiring Hahn's dialectical gifts but distrusting his taste for paradox, he rejects the metaphor of the money-holder as a national creditor and the fiction of a cashless economy that has never existed. Where Hahn holds that lending itself conjures the deposits banks lend, Reisch answers with clearing, liquidity, collateral, and public trust; drawing on Böhm-Bawerk's roundabout production, he insists that real capital is machines and subsistence goods, not an abstract power to command them. The book, he concludes, is a veiled plea for inflationary credit.
Niemals aber vermag inflatorischer Kredit „Güter aus dem Nichts zu ziehen“.
English translation: “Never, however, is inflationary credit able to "draw goods out of nothing.”
The Great War left Europe's monetary circulation almost wholly in the hands of central banks, which now furnish money rather than merely regulating it — the departure point for Reisch's practical observations, built on Menger, Mises, and Wieser. He reconsiders the banknote itself: once cash payments were suspended, its promise of redemption became a fiction, so the modern Schilling note is better read as a certificate of value whose parity the bank must defend. A discount rate held below the natural rate, he warns, drives production into overlong roundabout processes that end in liquidation and crisis; a wholly cashless economy, against Hahn, remains a fantasy; and the central bank stands as a primus inter pares disciplining the giro-money creation of private banks.
Es ist daher gewiß richtig, wenn die Federal Reserve-Banken die ihnen überreichlich zufließenden Goldmengen in weitem Maße „unausgenützt“ in ihren Kellern einsperren und nicht als Grundlage weiterer Kreditexpansion verwenden.
English translation: “It is therefore certainly correct that the Federal Reserve Banks largely lock away "unused" in their vaults the excessively abundant gold flowing to them, and do not use it as a basis for further credit expansion.”
Expanded from two Prague lectures, this 1935 Springer volume confronts a world in which the abandoned gold standard has left currencies isolated and distrusted, with governments reaching for devaluation as a weapon of trade policy. Devaluation, Reisch argues, is merely a valuta dumping that erodes trust and eventually raises the cost of imported inputs and of domestic goods; against it he sets an active policy for 'inländische Auslandwährung,' treating export-earned foreign exchange as a separate mass sold at differentiated rates. He develops Ernst Ružička's plan for a foreign trade bank issuing valuta bonds split into A coupons for vital imports and B coupons for dispensable ones, and offers the scheme as a faster road than devaluation toward a restored gold standard and world monetary peace.
Der Goldstandard war sozusagen die gemeinsame Sprache, das einigende Band im internationalen Handel.
English translation: “The gold standard was, so to speak, the common language, the unifying bond in international trade.”
Before 1914, Reisch observes, payments between nations moved smoothly because trade was freer, exchange rates were stable, and gold served as a common standard; the wreck of that order — through inflation, the abandonment of gold, and what he takes to be erroneous theory — is the disorder this book proposes to cure by stages. He rejects Keynes's money as a mere state-defined unit of account and Hahn's notion of banks conjuring purchasing power from nothing, insisting that credit always rests on real goods or claims. With Ernst Ružička he sketches a subsidiary payment system: neighboring states set up foreign trade banks and reciprocal gold-denominated credit lines, issuing Valutabons whose A coupons cover favored imports and whose B coupons, carrying a customs premium, cover tolerated ones — Leistungskompensation in place of shipping gold.
Die Vermengung der Begriffe Zahlungsmittel und Kreditbefriedigungsmittel erweist sich jedoch als verhängnisvoll: Geld ist wohl Gegenstand der Gewährung von Kredit, Kredit aber ist kein geeignetes Mittel, beliebig viel neues Geld zu schaffen.
English translation: “The conflation of the concepts of means of payment and means of satisfying credit proves to be disastrous: money is indeed an object of the granting of credit, but credit is not a suitable means for creating arbitrary amounts of new money.”
An accounting number carries authority only through orderly recording, documentary proof, and valuation rules fitted to the purpose of the balance sheet—the governing premise of this postwar Viennese handbook, which treats bookkeeping as at once a technical system and a legal-economic discipline. Kreibig and Reisch move from elementary entries through double-entry bookkeeping as a dual representation of enterprise life—each transaction seen once from the side of assets, once from that of capital—to inventory, account frameworks, valuation, reserves, audit, and special balance sheets. They ground valuation in the subjective value theory of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, make the Austrian uniform chart of accounts turn on separating financial from operating bookkeeping, and warn that familiar labels conceal unlike contents. Balance-sheet truth, on their account, is exact in method yet controlled, relative, and institutionally framed.
Jede Eintragung in die Handelsbücher muß durch einen Beleg begründet werden.
English translation: “Every entry in the commercial books must be substantiated by a supporting document.”