The archive.

A farmer can increase output, calculate carefully, and still become poorer. In this two-installment article of 1927–1928, Wilhelm Röpke examines why commercially advanced American agriculture remained vulnerable to debt, falling prices, and costs that resisted adjustment. His regional comparisons challenge easy equations between low yields and backwardness, or large acreage and the disappearance of family farming. The central tension is between individual enterprise and collective outcomes: responses to yesterday’s prices can produce tomorrow’s glut. This gives his criticism of the McNary-Haugen bill a specific edge—higher supported prices, without control of output, risk renewing the surplus they are meant to relieve. Röpke instead presses the case against industrial tariffs, showing how farmers could buy in a protected market while selling at world prices.

Opposition to communism, Röpke warns, need not prevent a state from copying Soviet methods of control. This newspaper article tests that distinction through accounts of Soviet Russia by M. Polányi, W. H. Chamberlin and André Gide. Röpke connects the failures of economic monopoly—poor goods, inadequate food, indifference to consumers—to the suppression of independent judgment. Gide’s disillusionment sharpens his question: why did an artist committed to individual creation expect freedom from collectivist organization? The article makes visible both Röpke’s institutional understanding of liberty and the contested reach of his conclusion: he treats Soviet experience not merely as evidence against one regime, but as grounds for arguing that socialist planning necessarily entails political dictatorship.

A stronger krone need not mean a richer Austria. In this article, Alfred Amonn challenges the demand for currency appreciation by separating money’s numerical value from the goods and services it can command. Against Emanuel Hugo Vogel, he argues that raising the exchange rate cannot create purchasing resources for the country; it can, however, redistribute income toward creditors while disrupting production. His alternative—stable domestic purchasing power—also presents a practical difficulty: Austria’s controlled prices, fiscal deficit, and delayed inflationary effects make existing monetary relationships unsuitable for immediate stabilization. The article connects a precise dispute over the aim of monetary policy with the difficult sequencing of reconstruction, showing why fiscal repair and price adjustment must, in Amonn’s account, precede durable stability.

Farmers building their own oil refineries give Hans Bayer a concrete alternative to accounts of American economic life dominated by free competition or monopoly. In this two-installment journal article, he follows cooperatives that moved beyond purchasing and marketing into production when powerful suppliers threatened their independence. Their expansion raises the central tension: how can organizations acquire the scale needed to confront large corporations without sacrificing democratic control? Bayer locates the answer in federations built from below, linking local initiative to national coordination. His affirmative account lets readers examine economic democracy through practical arrangements—member ownership, collective investment, and representation in agricultural planning—rather than as an abstract ideal. The distinctive interest lies in his treatment of industrial scale as a possible instrument of self-help, not necessarily its enemy.

Protecting a trade is not necessarily the same as protecting the people who practise it. In Der verschärfte Befähigungsnachweis, Markus Ettinger turns this distinction against stricter occupational qualification requirements, arguing that barriers supported by struggling masters could block their children’s advancement while favouring larger firms. His case follows concrete commercial connections: restrictions on provincial clothing and footwear dealers could deprive Viennese subcontractors of orders and drive them into competition with local bespoke producers. Yet his defence of open entry is not a rejection of collective regulation. Cooperative purchasing, regulated price agreements and labour protection offer alternative means of securing livelihoods. Ettinger’s study exposes the tension between excluding competitors and sustaining the wages, demand and mobility on which artisans themselves depend.

A prosperous pension fund need not mean a secure old age for the employees it claims to serve. In this 1894 collection of articles, Siegmund Feilbogen tests voluntary insurance against the needs of commercial employees exposed to business failures and denied the pension security of state officials. His case for compulsory provision combines social reform with actuarial restraint: early contributions and employer participation must finance credible benefits, not promises of comfortable retirement at negligible cost. Comparing institutions in Austria, Germany, France and Britain, he asks who actually joins, who withdraws, and what happens when incapacity precedes pension age. The resulting distinction between institutional success and effective protection gives concrete substance to his central question: when does individual thrift require a compulsory framework to become dependable security?

A child-labour law could penalize the manufacturer who obeyed it while leaving competitors free to exploit children. This practical contradiction anchors Viktor Mataja’s study of French labour protection from the campaigns preceding the 1841 law to the threshold of reform in 1874. Drawing on parliamentary debates, administrative reports and workers’ newspapers, Mataja asks why protective principles so often failed to become effective safeguards. He locates responsibility not only in weak statutes but in unpaid, socially dependent inspectors, unused administrative powers and political resistance to workers’ independence. His account also exposes tensions within reform itself: restrictions on children’s work threatened household earnings, while imperial welfare concessions could serve political control. The reader discovers how inspection, competitive pressures and workers’ ability to organize shaped what legislation actually delivered.

What evidence should ground an account of the earliest economic institutions? In this brief English-language review of W. Koppers’s Die Anfänge des menschlichen Gemeinschaftslebens, Eugen Peter Schwiedland approaches ethnology from a question pursued in his own Political Economy: how economic life began. He welcomes Koppers’s treatment of property alongside family, religion and other forms of communal life, but his strongest endorsement concerns method. Historically descriptive research, he argues, offers an alternative to philosophical sociology’s excessive reliance on imagination. Without testing that claim through detailed examples, the review records Schwiedland’s clear preference for ethnological evidence as a foundation for studying economic origins.

Greater need does not necessarily give a worker greater power to demand higher pay: family responsibilities may instead make leaving a poorly paid job harder. This tension anchors Richard Schüller’s account of workers’ demands as conditions for accepting employment, rather than wishes or a fixed subsistence minimum. He examines how savings, information, mobility and union support turn preferences into effective bargaining power. His distinctive claim is that the poorest workers do not automatically set wage levels: employers must also meet the demands of workers whose services they cannot replace. Readers can discover why partial unionization may matter, why dangerous work need not command a premium, and why labour supply depends on the terms offered. Schüller’s racial and national stereotypes also expose limits in his comparative analysis.

Salaried employees could strike, bargain collectively, and acknowledge a conflict with employers without abandoning their claims to middle-class distinction. This tension anchors Emil Lederer’s study of German private-sector employees after November 1918. Drawing on technical and commercial associations, salary agreements, and disputes over workplace representation, he distinguishes the adoption of union methods from conversion to socialism. Inflation eroded welfare funds, while comparisons with skilled workers’ earnings challenged assumptions of salaried superiority; yet occupational pride and nationalist allegiances persisted. Lederer treats revolution as an opening for collective action, not merely a consequence of economic decline. His account shows why increasingly similar employment interests could sustain sharply different political loyalties—and why organizational change cannot be read directly as a change in social identity.

A farmer who loses his land during deflation cannot be compensated by a later recovery in prices. This asymmetry gives concrete urgency to Eric Voegelin’s 1928 argument for legally mandating stability in the dollar’s purchasing power. Supporting James G. Strong’s proposed amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, Voegelin asks how a monetary policy already pursued in practice can withstand Treasury pressure and conflicts between agricultural and industrial interests. His distinctive concern is the gap between technical expertise and institutional purpose: knowledgeable officials cannot act impartially without an agreed objective. The article, accompanied by the bill’s German text, lets readers examine how a price-stability mandate was defended not merely as an economic instrument, but as a public standard for judging central-bank decisions.

Does equating a worker’s wage with the value of marginal output explain that wage—or merely restate a relation between values still needing explanation? Alfred Amonn’s methodological article challenges marginal-productivity theory on precisely this ground. He seeks a unified explanation of wages, interest, and rent through consumer demand, production requirements, and the distinct supply conditions of labour, capital, and land. His approach separates questions often run together: why an income category exists, what determines its magnitude, and whether it must take the form of a market payment. Rent on owner-cultivated land and saving without interest sharpen these distinctions. The result is an explanatory programme, not a finished model, that asks readers to distinguish an equilibrium condition from an account of the forces producing it.