The archive.

High profits, scarce land, and exclusive supply are not interchangeable evidence of monopoly. In this 1925 encyclopedia article, Franz Xaver Weiss asks what distinguishes actual control over market prices from advantages earned within competition. Railway tariffs, patents, and public utilities give concrete substance to his distinctions: exclusive provision may serve consumers rather than maximize profit, while state ownership alone guarantees neither purpose nor efficiency. His account couples the mechanics of output restriction and pricing with a criticism of economists who stretch “monopoly” to encompass scarcity or unearned income generally. Readers can discover why identifying who controls supply—and how that control is sustained—matters more for Weiss than labeling an income excessive, and why he regards conceptual precision as a safeguard against mistaken economic policy.

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.

Private ownership without competitive coordination: this is the compromise Wilhelm Röpke examines in his 1925 encyclopedia entry on Planwirtschaft. The German programme associated with Rathenau, Moellendorff and Wissel proposed retaining entrepreneurs while placing economic direction in representative bodies of employers, workers, consumers and the state. Röpke identifies its central tension: it sought socialist purposes without the bureaucratic stagnation its advocates feared from outright nationalization. Yet restrictions on entrepreneurial initiative alienated business, while the preservation of capitalist ownership disappointed the socialist left. His concise account distinguishes the programme’s institutional influence from any demonstrated practical success, allowing readers to see precisely what this proposed middle course promised—and why its compromise attracted opposition from both sides.

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.”

An unemployment figure may count union members, registered jobseekers, or people eligible for insurance: the same label can conceal different populations. In this 1925 lecture pamphlet, Karl Pribram, head of the International Labour Office’s statistical department, examines what must be known before national labour statistics can responsibly be compared. His perspective combines the practical demands of international social policy with close attention to how laws, administrative routines, and employment arrangements shape numerical evidence. Wage purchasing-power comparisons provide a revealing case: contractual rates measured against food baskets cannot simply stand for actual earnings or living standards. Rather than demand wholesale uniformity, Pribram argues for feasible coordination and explicit disclosure of methods. The result shows why understanding a statistic’s institutional origins is part of interpreting its value.

Can production be rationally coordinated without market prices? In this 1925 encyclopedia entry, Hans Mayer treats that question as a problem of scarce resources, competing wants and practical knowledge—not simply of ownership. He argues that accumulated experience and marginal valuations can guide collective production, while distinguishing calculability from the capacities of those directing it. His account also draws a sharp line between contributing labour and controlling a production plan: who counts as the producer depends on legal rights and power, not technical participation alone. Read together, these distinctions illuminate what Mayer considers common to market and collective economies, and what their institutions change: the means of calculation, the authority to allocate resources, and the wants that production actually serves.

Sunlight, knowledge, labour, and machinery all help make production possible; why count only some as economic factors? In this encyclopedia entry, Hans Mayer defends the classification into nature, labour, and capital by distinguishing causal necessity from dependence on scarce productive means. His treatment of capital makes the distinction concrete: although machines are made with labour and natural resources, replacing them takes time, so present output depends on the existing stock. Equally important is his separation of productive contribution from entitlement to income: property rights and institutions require their own explanation. The entry offers a compact way to examine what factor theory can explain about valuation—and why it cannot, by itself, explain who receives the proceeds of production.

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.