The archive.

Does Ricardo’s abstraction from motives other than self-interest amount to a claim about human nature? Franz Xaver Weiss argues that it does not: isolating causes is a theoretical procedure, not an exhaustive portrait of conduct. In this critical article, he challenges ideological readings of Ricardo before examining Alfred Amonn’s 1924 introduction. His defence is discriminating rather than unconditional. Production time and capital profit, he argues, lead Ricardo beyond strict labour-value doctrine, while deficiencies in the treatment of demand remain real. Even a landlord’s renunciation of rent becomes a test of interpretive precision: a proposition about grain prices says nothing by itself against altruism. Readers can discover how reconstructing an economist’s premises changes the assessment of both his achievements and his errors.

Not whether the state can decree a price, but what follows when a decreed price is meant to replace the one the market would form: that is the question this theoretical essay on official price fixing pursues within an order still based on private ownership. Mises distinguishes Ordnungstaxen, which hover near the market price and barely disturb it, from genuine controls that push maximum or minimum prices away from the unhampered level. A ceiling breeds shortage, hoarding, rationing, and finally compulsory production; a wage floor breeds unsold labor. Each isolated intervention forces a choice between retreat and further command. Price fixing, he concludes, is no stable third system between capitalism and socialism but cumulative social theory. Reprinted as Theorie der Preistaxen.

Der behördlich festgelegte Preis aber zerstört den Markt, auf dem Waren und Dienste gegen Geld gekauft und verkauft werden.

English translation: “The officially fixed price, however, destroys the market on which goods and services are bought and sold for money.”

State ownership does not by itself make an industrial strategy. In this short review of Felix Guggenheim’s study, Emil Lederer considers how the Reich’s collection of wartime factories and inflation-era investments became the industrial group Viag. He commends Guggenheim’s descriptive restraint while emphasizing a pointed distinction: a holding company must be more than a government office in corporate form. Commercial accounting, managerial flexibility, and entrepreneurial direction could, in Lederer’s account, operate within public ownership. The concrete test was Viag’s concentration on electrical and related industries and its disposal of unrelated holdings. The review offers a compact account of the difference between possessing industrial assets and directing their development.

A securities handbook’s revisions provide Helene Lieser with concrete measures of change after German currency stabilization. In this short 1925 review of Parts I and II of Salings Börsenpapiere for 1925/26, she values current financial information but looks beyond its usefulness to traders. She particularly welcomes the new compilation of German corporate groups as a resource for studying the economy and hopes it will grow. Her sharpest observation concerns a shrinking section: newly added securities occupy less than one page, against three the previous year. The review shows what Lieser sought in a capital-market reference—and how even its changing proportions could register economic conditions.

Was inflationary finance a necessity of state survival, or a policy whose alternatives went unused? In this brief closing intervention at the 1924 meeting, published in 1925 and republished here in 2022, Felix Somary presses the second view. His replies to fellow economists turn disputes over monetary theory into questions of fiscal and central-bank responsibility. He recalls demands for a capital levy during the war and argues that stronger postwar taxation could have displaced reliance on the printing press. His objection to raising the discount rate from 7 to 8 percent—when he suggests perhaps 30 percent was needed—makes the scale of his criticism concrete. The exchange shows precisely where Somary locates avoidable failure, while acknowledging the possible necessity of emergency money creation immediately after the war.

Starting economic analysis with individual wants does not, for Friedrich von Wieser, entail unrestricted economic freedom. In this dictionary article, he presents the Austrian School’s shared foundation in marginal utility while identifying disagreements among Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and himself. The revealing tension lies between subjective need and market valuation: monetary offers register purchasing power as well as the urgency of wants. Wieser therefore assigns public provision a different standard from market exchange and argues for progressive taxation. His account lets readers see how a common theory of value could support divergent explanations of interest and different judgements about economic policy. It is both an exposition of Austrian economics and a participant’s effort to define its scope without suppressing its internal differences.

Austria's monetary history from 1892 to 1924 becomes, in this English-language report, a case study in how stability depends on more than a loan. Schumpeter traces the late-Habsburg gold-exchange crown, its destruction by wartime finance through discounted treasury bills and bank advances, the monetary dismemberment that followed imperial collapse, and the 1922 Geneva protocols that brought League of Nations control. The achievement, he insists, was not restoring the old crown but stabilizing at the fallen parity, 14,400 paper crowns to one gold crown, once note issue for the treasury had stopped and an independent National Bank could defend the exchange. His verdict stays guarded: inflation had wrecked saving, imports outran exports, and Vienna's financial role remained uncertain. A gold-exchange standard holds only when fiscal discipline, banking, and productive recovery sustain the promise.

The program of reconstruction was essentially a program of economic liberalism.

A privately owned central bank might reassure foreign creditors without managing money any better than a public institution. This distinction anchors Alfred Amonn’s critique of Czechoslovakia’s proposed bank of issue. He judges institutional reform by what it actually provides: reserves, control over note circulation, and a usable monetary yardstick. Diverting capital-levy receipts to government debt repayment, he argues, would weaken the new bank’s starting position. His defence of a larger monetary unit introduces a subtler tension: redenomination cannot itself change purchasing power, yet it can make losses in real income visible. Rent controls and senior civil-service salaries show how misleading nominal figures can obstruct adjustment. The article offers a concrete encounter with monetary reform as both financial engineering and a problem of public perception.

Higher farm prices can enrich agricultural producers while leaving the economy poorer. In this 1925 discussion article, Alfred Amonn challenges E. Laur’s inference from agricultural prosperity to national gain by asking what increased domestic production displaces. Labour and capital drawn into farming might otherwise produce industrial goods capable of purchasing more food through international exchange; farmers’ increased purchasing power must also be weighed against consumers’ losses. Amonn’s distinctive insistence is that physical output, sectoral income, and national income require separate judgements. His qualified allowance for temporary protection makes this more than a categorical argument against intervention. The article offers a concrete way to test claims of national benefit: compare alternative uses of resources rather than treating one sector’s gains as gains for everyone.

Can a theory of individual satisfaction explain prices, incomes, and the organization of a social economy? In this two-part critical article, Alfred Amonn tests Friedrich von Wieser’s answer against distinctions that economic abstraction can obscure: between subjective valuation and monetary calculation, individual purposes and relations among persons, explanation and ethical judgment. His objection is concrete: equal prices do not imply equal satisfactions, and accounting in money does not establish that utilities can be added together. Reviewing Wieser’s second edition, Amonn combines appreciation of its sociological insight with scrutiny of explanations that presuppose the prices they seek to derive. The article offers a sustained encounter with the limits of utility-based explanation—and with the question of what disappears when a society is modelled as a single economic subject.

A theory of prices can be logically consistent yet fail to explain why people earn different incomes. In this rejoinder to Franz Oppenheimer, Alfred Amonn withdraws several earlier objections to the reconstructed objective theory of value, then tests the assumptions that remain. Equally capable producers may accept lower earnings to avoid danger or disagreeable work; equal working conditions do not identify a uniquely “normal” worker. These concrete difficulties sharpen Amonn’s distinction between deductive coherence and empirical explanation. His defence of subjective valuation is equally precise: judgments shaped by social circumstances are still judgments made by individuals. The reader encounters an argument for retaining valuing subjects in price theory without treating them as socially isolated—or endorsing marginal utility theory wholesale.

Can support for agriculture justify tariffs that preserve landed rents rather than strengthen farming? In this 1926 review of the first volume of Bernhard Harms’s study of German trade policy, Wilhelm Röpke praises an ally against renewed agricultural protection while probing the concessions that weaken Harms’s case. Economic growth under a tariff regime, he argues, does not prove that protection caused it; emergency and educational duties must not become excuses for permanent shelter. The review’s distinctive tension lies in Röpke’s defense of free trade as a policy for, not against, a vigorous independent peasantry. Readers encounter a precise disagreement over how economic principles should constrain practical compromises—and why protecting established agricultural interests need not mean securing agriculture’s future.