The archive.

An invitation to refute a doctrine becomes comic when the speaker declares in advance that no critic can succeed. Felix Kaufmann’s two-stanza song turns economic conviction into a performance of certainty: marginal utility supplies the recurring answer, while Vienna claims privileged access to liberalism’s reasons. The sharper joke concerns values, which the speaker holds at a distance before insisting that thought cannot proceed without them. In Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, with music by Gustav Pick, readers encounter a compact satire of theoretical allegiance and methodological self-contradiction. Although the title names Mises and Mayer, the lyrics leave their respective positions unassigned; the interest lies in the confident voice and the tensions it cannot quite conceal.

Does closer knowledge of an economy’s complexity discourage intervention—or equip governments to intervene? In this comment on George Stigler, Murray N. Rothbard argues that statistical inquiry and administrative power can grow together, even when researchers have no political program. His laissez-faire perspective centres on a distinction between entrepreneurs’ knowledge of prices, costs, and profits and the aggregate information required by economic planners. Examples ranging from social surveys to input-output analysis give concrete form to his contention that methods of observation can become instruments of control. The comment also exposes a methodological dispute: whether empirical attention to particular problems sufficiently disciplines policy, or whether deductive theory is needed to reveal resource constraints and opportunity costs.

A tax system can be severe on paper yet lenient toward those whose income is hardest to see. Rudolf Sieghart’s account of Austria’s direct-tax reform begins with this disparity: company profits and official salaries bore burdens that concealed investment income often escaped. His qualified defence of the new system turns on a concrete distinction—between taxing separate sources of revenue and assessing a household’s overall capacity to pay. Family allowances, taxpayer participation in assessment, and penalties for false declarations make that distinction practical rather than merely theoretical. Yet Sieghart also identifies concessions that compromise equity, including exemptions for investments and abatements favouring great landowners. The article offers a precise account of how progressive taxation depends on disclosure, enforcement, and the division of revenue between imperial and local government.

A scientist writes through the night until a methodologist compares his prose to beer foam and dismisses his a priori assumptions. In Felix Kaufmann’s satirical song, scholarly correction becomes mock-tragic catastrophe: the manuscript turns to ashes, taking its author’s sense of purpose with it. Yet the scientist’s increasingly elaborate “knots” of thought leave his own intellectual pretensions exposed. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, with music by Friedrich Silcher and an acknowledged debt to Heinrich Heine, this miniature stages a pointed tension between critical scrutiny and the confidence inquiry requires. Its comedy lies in the disproportion between a methodological rebuke and the ruin it brings.

Manufacturers who resisted government intervention on behalf of striking miners demanded it when mine-owners raised the price of coal. This reversal sharpens Eugen von Philippovich’s contemporary report on the January–March 1900 strike in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. He follows a struggle for shorter hours and better pay that mobilized at least 60,000 workers but ended in exhaustion, failed mediation, and weakened labour leadership. Sympathetic to the miners yet critical of leaders who prolonged a struggle they believed unwinnable, Philippovich also examines the limits of solidarity among employers. His account connects the defeat at the pits with the subsequent conflict over coal prices, showing how control of an indispensable fuel made a wage dispute a question of public regulation.

An economy can reproduce its familiar routines without explaining how genuinely new forms of production arise. Schumpeter makes this gap the starting point of his theory: development comes from entrepreneurs who implement new combinations, not simply from owners, inventors, or accumulated savings. Bank-created purchasing power allows them to draw resources away from established uses before their ventures yield goods. This mechanism connects initiative to disruption: the forces that generate profit also unsettle existing businesses and set cyclical adjustment in motion. In this seven-chapter first edition, issued in 1911 with a 1912 title-page date, Schumpeter also explores entrepreneurial motivation and the relation between economic leadership and wider social change. Readers encounter a theory in which credit does not merely support production already under way; it helps determine what can be produced next.

Goods can remain in a warehouse while their ownership changes and their value finances fresh trade—but what legal documents make this possible? In this 1869 offprint, Emil Sax argues that Austria’s warehouse policy neglects the machinery of commodity credit. His concrete test is whether a merchant can sell stored goods while they remain pledged to a lender. Drawing on Belgian practice, he shows how separate, coordinated documents for ownership and security can protect both transactions, whereas Austria’s single receipt risks confusing them. Sax approaches commercial infrastructure through the rights it must sustain, not merely the buildings it requires. His examples reveal why an apparently simpler rule can obstruct credit, expose owners to loss, and undermine confidence in a promising commercial institution.

Peasants who negotiate a lease by excluding the Civil Code’s provisions supply the telling example in Siegmund Feilbogen’s brief review of Eugen Ehrlich: enacted law and rules actually followed need not coincide. Writing for the Journal des économistes, Feilbogen foregrounds Ehrlich’s challenge to faith in legislative remedies and draws out its affinities with economic liberalism. Yet he does not reduce legal sociology to an argument against state intervention. His closing judgement locates Ehrlich’s scientific contribution in the relationship between social change and legal change. The review offers a compact encounter between a liberal economist’s concerns and a conception of law grounded in observed practice, showing both their common ground and the broader inquiry Feilbogen acknowledges beyond his own emphasis.

Should a stock of identical goods be valued by adding the different utilities its units secure, or by multiplying their number by marginal utility? In this first installment of his study, Hans Mayer reopens the dispute between Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser without accepting that either formula must hold universally. His distinctive move is to separate a valuation rule’s applicability from the soundness of its proof: defective reasoning need not invalidate an observed practice. Mayer shows why uniform market prices cannot establish equal subjective valuations and why calculations that assume consumption all at once may misrepresent economic planning. The positive derivation remains for a later installment; here readers discover how the timing of consumption changes the terms of an apparently mathematical dispute.

Rising profits can conceal shrinking wealth. In this brief English-language review of Julius Wolf’s 1920 study, Eugen Peter Schwiedland foregrounds the unequal losses behind Germany’s currency depreciation: wages trail prices, salaries lag further, and bondholders’ nominal incomes remain unchanged. His largely expository account connects these contrasts to Wolf’s diagnosis of a government unable to align expenditure with revenue. The central tension is between apparent industrial prosperity and the continuing monetary expansion that undermines purchasing power and unsettles trade. Read as a contemporary assessment rather than a retrospective explanation, the review shows how Wolf’s forecast of further depreciation rested on political constraints on spending cuts, not simply on the quantity of banknotes.

A profitable bank of issue need not be a secure one. This distinction drives Robert Zuckerkandl’s 1899 encyclopedia article on the Austrian Nationalbank and its Austro-Hungarian successor, covering 1816–1898. He shows how lucrative treasury dealings left notes payable on demand backed by government debts that could not readily be turned into cash—and why decades of successful redemption could conceal that vulnerability. His institutional perspective also exposes tensions within reform: reserve restrictions could impede emergency lending, while political equality between Austria and Hungary complicated unified management. The account culminates in preparations for gold currency and proposed charter changes still awaiting enactment. Readers can discover how monetary stability depended not simply on metallic reserves, but on the arrangements governing state borrowing, public reporting, crisis lending and shared control.

Full employment conjured from uncovered credit repeats, on Kerschagl's reading, John Law's old error: trying to replace scarce capital with purchasing power. This 1953 essay argues that printing money before consumable goods exist does not abolish scarcity but forces present consumers to finance future production through lower real consumption or higher prices—there are, he warns, no miracle cures. Keynes is placed within that line of reformers, and Dobretsberger's scheme to finance hydropower by note issue serves as the test case: domestically buildable, perhaps, but the new purchasing power would arrive long before the electricity. Against the illusion Kerschagl sets a real-factor remedy of deliberate austerity—new capital formed only through saving and work, weak accumulation traced to three inflations, and employment secured not by protected inefficiency but by rising productivity across all sectors.

Erhöhte Arbeitsleistung je Arbeiter zerstört nicht Arbeitsplätze, sondern schafft neue.

English translation: “Increased output per worker does not destroy jobs; it creates new ones.”