The archive.

Choosing between two goods is not the same as calculating how best to produce them. This distinction anchors Ludwig von Mises’s 1928 review of recent writings on socialist economic calculation. Against Otto Neurath’s defense of calculation in kind, Mises asks how heterogeneous resources can be brought into a common accounting framework; criticism of capitalist accounting, he insists, does not establish a workable alternative. His strongest endorsement goes to Boris Brutzkus’s analysis of Soviet experience, particularly its challenge to labor-cost accounting in production that also uses capital and natural resources. The review offers a compact encounter with Mises as a critical reader, testing competing proposals against a precise requirement: explaining how a planned economy could compare productive alternatives rather than merely enumerate its resources.

Would opening access to land abolish capital profit—or would independent producers still need tools, buildings, and subsistence on credit? This is one of Alfred Amonn’s concrete tests of Franz Oppenheimer’s economic system in his two-part critical study of 1928. Amonn insists that the historical injustice of property relations cannot by itself explain how prices and incomes are determined. Defending marginal utility theory against Oppenheimer’s objections, he also challenges the inference from competition to equal incomes and from landownership to the dependence of wage workers. The interest lies in the distance Amonn maintains between sympathy for emancipatory reform and acceptance of its economic premises: his criticism shows precisely where a proposed abolition of privilege still owes an explanation of wages, interest, and rent.

Set aside wars, politics, and social conflict: the real question is whether capitalism harbors an economic tendency toward its own breakdown. Schumpeter's answer is narrow and paradoxical—the system of business conditions is unstable because innovation ceaselessly disrupts equilibrium, yet the capitalist order is not economically self-destructive. Defining capitalism by private initiative, market production, and above all credit, he first defends static equilibrium theory, then locates the disruptive force not in mere growth of population or savings but in innovation: the discontinuous shift of resources into uses hitherto untried. From this follow entrepreneurial profit, credit creation, and endogenous business cycles that cluster into boom and depression. Trustified capitalism, absorbing risk and routinizing research, tames that very instability—so capitalism's eventual transformation, he insists, will be sociological, not a law of economic collapse.

And we may phrase the result we reach in our terminology by saying that there is, though instability of the System, no economic instability of the Order.

Owning a business does not, for Schumpeter, make someone an entrepreneur; nor does managing it efficiently. In this 1928 encyclopedia article, he locates entrepreneurship in the practical implementation of new economic possibilities—redirecting resources while overcoming habit, uncertainty, and resistance from creditors, workers, or customers. His distinction makes room for salaried directors and promoters as well as owner-managers, separating entrepreneurial leadership from property, invention, and routine administration. Readers can discover why profit seeking alone cannot explain this activity, and why its institutional setting matters. The article’s closing tension sharpens the account: as innovation becomes customary and specialist expertise makes decisions more calculable, economic development may diminish the need for the exceptional personal leadership that helped set it in motion.

Excessive foreign borrowing can burden taxpayers without making repayment a threat to currency stability. That distinction drives Fritz Machlup’s 1928 intervention in the dispute between Hjalmar Schacht and his critics. Machlup shares their concern about Germany’s debts but challenges the assumption that a country’s difficulty raising payments proves an independent inability to transfer them abroad. He traces how setting aside repayment funds reduces domestic purchasing power, changing imports, exports, and the availability of foreign exchange—provided new credit does not undo that withdrawal. His argument connects municipal budgets with the monetary mechanics of reparations under the Dawes Plan. It offers readers a precise way to distinguish fiscal hardship from transfer obstacles, while exposing the policy assumptions on which his account of adjustment depends.

The unglamorous problem of covering the Reich deficit becomes the occasion for a theory of who ultimately bears a general turnover tax. A moderate increase, Schumpeter argues, is administratively the easiest of all measures and discriminates less against saving than income or inheritance taxes—no tax being an ideal in any case. The conceptual center is incidence: he dismisses the sterile dispute over whether the levy is direct or indirect, since legal form never fixes economic burden. The Umsatzsteuer's very generality blocks escape into untaxed branches, yet full shifting to consumers would demand a rising price level that Reichsbank policy forbids. Because a tax on value turnover differs from one per physical unit, it favors decreasing-cost and burdens increasing-cost industries, with a nod to Marshall—its incidence diffuse, structurally mediated, and precisely thereby tolerable.

Wenn wir einen paradox klingenden Satz riskieren dürfen – die Allgemeinheit dieser »Verbrauchssteuer« beraubt sie ihres Charakters als Verbrauchssteuer.

English translation: “If we may venture a paradoxical-sounding proposition — the very generality of this »consumption tax« robs it of its character as a consumption tax.”

The rift between theory and practice runs deeper in economics than in almost any other field, and this essay sets out to bridge rather than deny it. Theory, Strigl argues, discovers causal relations but cannot choose political ends; classical liberalism only seemed to unite the two because it quietly adopted an end of its own — national wealth, the wealth of nations — which cannot by itself settle questions of distribution, welfare, or national power. When policy abandons theory altogether, it does not escape theory but falls into “vulgar economics,” a patchwork of exploitation claims and slogans that blames merchants for high prices and treats faster money circulation as a cure. Rebuilt on marginal analysis and a theory of the economy’s data, pure theory earns its service role: not dictating aims, but showing what follows from chosen means.

Man sieht hier deutlich, wie der liberale Freihandelsgedanke den wirtschaftlichen Erfolg ganz allein in den Vordergrund rückt.

English translation: “One sees clearly here how the liberal free-trade idea places economic success alone in the foreground.”

Modern culture, for all its machinery, has not freed anyone from material dependence, and that unfreedom, Schwiedland contends, now shapes character, morality, and world politics alike. His survey of the West's crisis runs from the psychic toll of rationalization and big-city life, through capitalism, individualism, and imperialism, to a social question that has outgrown classes and nations to set whole continents against one another. Europe, exhausted by war and stripped of prestige, confronts three non-European powers, the United States, Russia, and Japan, while its former colonies industrialize and awaken to national self-determination. Against economic feudalism by cartel and trust, he urges European integration, Riedl's collective trade treaties, and the League of Nations, insisting that peace must be built by deliberate effort, not awaited.

Willst du Kriege vermieden sehen, so organisiere den Frieden.

English translation: “If you wish to see wars avoided, then organize peace.”

Every endogenous theory of crisis, this 1928 essay contends, must in the end become a theory of disproportion — not a hunt for one privileged cause but an inquiry into which mismatches harden into cyclical form. Lederer locates the decisive asymmetry in unequal elasticity: raw materials and profits rise faster than wages, salaries, and interest, so accumulation shifts the social product away from consumption even as real wages climb. Ordinary discrepancies self-correct through price and capital movements; crisis begins only when a distributive disproportion becomes rigid and resists the market's usual repair. Banks and technical innovation amplify the swing. Against those who would cure a slump by lending alone, he warns that producer credit cannot conjure the final purchasing power output needs, and that noninflationary recovery would demand a degree of coordinated planning beyond the ordinary banking system.

Eine Diskrepanz der Einkommen aber löst keine Gegenbewegung im Angebot der Arbeitskräfte aus.

English translation: “A discrepancy in incomes, however, triggers no counter-movement in the supply of labor.”

Because the study of foreign trade sets every part of economic theory in motion, Schüller refuses to reason from abstract 'branches of production' and turns instead to real firms making the same good at different costs, so that imports strike down the high-cost producer while the low-cost one survives. On that footing he rebuilds the free-trade case, reading the comparative-cost doctrine of Ricardo and Mill as tacitly resting on a subjective theory of price, and gauging tariffs by the spread of domestic costs and the degree of foreign superiority. The later chapters turn to postwar currency disorder and the revival of mercantilist reflexes, to cartel dumping and the Brussels Sugar Convention, to the transfer problem of reparations and interstate debt, and to the hard prospects of customs unions among sovereign states.

Von entscheidender Bedeutung ist, daß die Erreichung entsprechender Erleichterungen für die Ausfuhr vorteilhafter ist als die Behinderung der Einfuhr.

English translation: “It is of decisive importance that achieving corresponding facilitations for exports is more advantageous than obstructing imports.”

Who legally pays a tax tells you almost nothing about who ultimately bears it — this is the wedge Strigl drives through the theory of tax shifting. Building a deliberately simplified static economy of circular flow, where entrepreneurs buy factors and sell at cost price without profit or loss, he shows that a levy on labor or land alters demand, supply, output, and prices whether the buyer or the seller formally remits it, so that incidence turns on the elasticity of supply and demand rather than on legal form. An income tax generally cannot be shifted, since the purchasing power it removes reappears as state demand; a tax on entrepreneurial profit is the archetype of the non-shiftable tax, yet by starving capital formation and blunting competition it harms the very factor owners and consumers it seems to spare.

Man kann leicht sehen, daß der Unternehmer nicht einfach den Betrag der Steuer auf den Preis des Produktes aufschlagen kann.

English translation: “It is easy to see that the entrepreneur cannot simply add the amount of the tax onto the price of the product.”

Business-cycle theories may be easier to distinguish than the theorists who hold them. In this brief 1929 review of Alvin Harvey Hansen’s Business-Cycle Theory, Gottfried Haberler endorses Hansen’s refusal to draw a rigid boundary between monetary and non-monetary explanations, yet questions the usefulness of a classification in which the same authors repeatedly reappear. His pointed objection to the placement of harvest theories makes the difficulty concrete: does locating cyclical effects within capitalism adequately distinguish their causes? Haberler’s discriminating appraisal separates orderly presentation from substantive insight, reserving his praise for Hansen’s detailed analysis, especially his criticism of Foster and Catchings. The review offers a compact example of Haberler judging competing explanations without forcing their proponents into exclusive camps.