2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Abolishing private ownership would not settle how much leather should go into shoes or how resources should be divided between agriculture and railways. In this 1934 newspaper article, Wilhelm Röpke shifts the dispute over capitalism from intentions to the practical means of choosing among competing needs. His objection to comprehensive planning grants administrators intelligence and integrity but questions how they could calculate without market valuations. Yet his defence of markets is conditional: purchasing power is unequal, monopoly severs profit from performance, and capitalists themselves may evade competition or shift losses onto society. The article makes a precise distinction available to readers: preserving the coordinating work of prices need not mean endorsing every existing distribution of wealth or excluding public enterprise and redistribution.
An economy can revive without the world economy recovering. This distinction gives Wilhelm Röpke’s 1935 commentary its conditional optimism: renewed private investment offers evidence of market resilience, but national upswings remain vulnerable to monetary instability and barriers to trade. He attributes America’s acceleration to restored entrepreneurial confidence and a retreat from policy experimentation, while warning that cheap credit and gold inflows could turn recovery into another excessive boom. His international perspective also sharpens a concrete domestic criticism: protecting grain prices can harm other farmers by raising feed costs and reducing consumers’ purchasing power. The essay offers a contemporary liberal diagnosis of recovery in progress, asking how self-sustaining investment can be distinguished from state-supported activity—and why prosperity within national borders is not enough.