1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
How can a compulsory levy, taken without any direct return, ever be called just? Robert Meyer's 1884 treatise answers by treating tax justice as a problem of distributive justice, and it does so with the young marginal-utility economics of his Vienna: the sacrifice a tax imposes is measured by the intensity of the least urgent needs it forces the household to leave unmet, citing Carl Menger on the dependence of life on need-satisfaction. A vast first part traces doctrines of just taxation from Bodin and Vauban through Adam Smith to Wagner, Schaffle, and Schmoller; a second analyzes how taxes ripple through prices, interest, capital values, and wages; a third derives its principles — exemption of the subsistence minimum, ability to pay, equality of sacrifice, moderate progression, and heavier burdens on unearned and windfall gains.
Die Wirkung der Steuer drückt sich in dem Unterschiede der Intensität der früher und der jetzt befriedigten mindest dringenden Bedürfnisse aus.
English translation: “The effect of the tax is expressed in the difference in the intensity of the least urgent needs satisfied before and now.”
Income is among the most familiar terms in economics and among the most treacherous to pin down, a difficulty Meyer makes the starting point of this inquiry. Tracing the dominant Hermann-Schmoller doctrine back to Adam Smith's notion of annual product, he argues that it never escaped Smith's contradictions between production, consumption, and capital maintenance. Against it he builds his own distinction: national income is a recurrent stock of first-order consumption goods, while individual income is a sum of money and purchasing power, the two related causally rather than identically. Recurrence, secured through labor and the reproduction of the means of production, becomes the organizing thread. An appendix turns on Boehm-Bawerk's critique of exploitation theory, recalculating the steam-engine example to expose an ambiguity between labor's product and equal pay for equal work.
Das Einkommen ist keine Ertragskategorie.
English translation: “Income is not a category of yield.”
Never before, Meyer observes, had Austrian taxation asked how much a man possessed altogether rather than taxing each source, land, buildings, trade, salary, rent, in isolation. Written as a practical Wegweiser to the 1896 personal income-tax reform, this second booklet walks the taxpayer through the new law: the progressive scale rising from roughly 0.6 to nearly 5 percent, the exemption of subsistence income below 600 florins, the combined taxation of a household's income, and the deductions allowed for debt interest, illness, and dependents. Meyer defends the reform's institutional novelty, assessment by commissions half-elected by the taxpayers themselves, and insists throughout that consumption and expenditure serve only as a basis for estimating income, never as the object of tax. Rentiers, long escaping the net, now become taxpayers.
Der Haushalt ist keine Abzugspost vom Einkommen, sondern eine Verwendung des Einkommens.
English translation: “The household is not a deduction from income, but a use of income.”
A tax that aims at a year's income faces a stubborn obstacle: the income cannot be known until the year has closed, by which time the taxpayer's ability to pay may already have changed. Meyer devotes this contribution to Austrian tax law and income theory to that temporal gap, dissecting the legal devices, prior-year assessment, three-year averaging, estimated current income, that substitute for the impossible simultaneity of income and tax. He is sharpest on the beginning and ending fragments of income, where sources that arise or cease mid-period escape or overpay tax, and he turns his critique against the Prussian source theory, which cannot handle successive income drawn from a single source. A redrafted paragraph 156 closes the argument, and behind it lies a claim about income's double meaning, whole and parts.
Die Identität des Wirtschaftsjahres und des Steuerjahres schwebt uns als kategorischer Imperativ vor.
English translation: “The identity of the economic year and the tax year stands before us as a categorical imperative.”
Delivered to the Lower Austrian Trade Association in February 1914, this lecture reports back from the fourteenth session of the International Statistical Institute, whose forty-nine printed reports Meyer sifts for what economic statistics had achieved. He dwells on the hardest problems of comparability: rival methods for estimating national income and national wealth, weighed through Kiaer's tax-list approach and Fellner's contested Austro-Hungarian valuations; Neymarck's running census of the world's negotiable securities; the semiology of index numbers and whether diverse indicators may be fused into one; and the vexed measurement of unemployment. Throughout, Meyer treats the Institute not as a popular congress but as a cooperative body harmonizing national data for the use of governments, and he insists that technical care in statistics serves the larger understanding of economic regularity.
La paix du monde, paix internationale entre les peuples et les gouvernements, la paix intérieure entre les hommes s'imposent pour maintenir l'échafaudage actuel de papiers de crédit et d'affaires qui existe.
English translation: “World peace—international peace between peoples and governments, and internal peace among men—is indispensable to maintain the existing scaffolding of credit paper and business affairs.”