The archive.

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.”

Can prices be explained without understanding what goods mean to the people who choose among them? In this signed 1928 supplement to Böhm-Bawerk’s encyclopedia article on value, Franz Xaver Weiss defends subjective valuation without requiring measurable satisfaction, pleasure-seeking motives, or agreement on desirable ends. His central distinction is between ranking purposes and measuring utility: people can choose which needs to meet without assigning numerical values to their satisfaction. From this standpoint, he treats production costs and mathematical price interdependence not as refutations of utility theory but as phenomena it must explain. The supplement offers a focused encounter with the boundary between equilibrium equations and explanations of action—and with Weiss’s contention that critics who discard the language of value often retain its explanatory substance.

A forecast of rising prices can prompt buyers to purchase sooner and sellers to withhold stocks—altering the very movement it predicts. This feedback problem anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s investigation of economic forecasting. He distinguishes the anticipation indispensable to every consumer and entrepreneur from the much stronger claim that an entire economy’s future can be scientifically predicted. His objection is not simply that statistics are inadequate: published predictions become new causes, while historical comparisons depend on relationships that may no longer hold. Readers can discover why better information need not yield reliable total forecasts, and why Morgenstern nevertheless advocates fuller disclosure of inventories, orders, employment, and costs. His alternative gives research institutes a concrete task: illuminate present conditions so that individuals can make better-informed decisions.

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.”

A fixed gold price is not the same thing as stable purchasing power: this distinction anchors Richard Kerschagl’s review of Edmund Herzfelder’s attack on the gold standard. Kerschagl argues that Herzfelder mistakes the maintenance of exchange rates for a promise to hold gold’s economic value constant. His criticism becomes especially concrete when he tests Herzfelder’s proposed replacement of gold reserves with government obligations: would changing the reserve asset actually free countries from the pressures of international payments? Readers encounter a defence of monetary constraints rather than an unconditional defence of gold. Kerschagl remains open to central-bank cooperation and reduced gold dependence, while demanding that reformers explain how domestic price policy can coexist with stable external exchange rates.

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.”

Land, labour, and equipment produce goods together—but how can each input acquire a separate value? In this encyclopedia entry, Hans Mayer examines the problem of economic imputation, distinguishing it from both physical causation and claims about just remuneration. His criticism of Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, and marginal productivity theory turns on a concrete difficulty: values calculated for an already settled production arrangement may presuppose the allocation they should explain. Mayer instead locates valuation within the formation of the production plan, asking what satisfaction would be lost if an input were withdrawn and its complements reassigned. Readers can discover why such hypothetical losses do not automatically yield mutually consistent factor values, and how Mayer proposes to connect them to entrepreneurial bids, production costs, and incomes.

A ceiling on foreign borrowing means little, L. Albert Hahn argues, without asking where the borrowed money goes. In this brief conference contribution, published in 1929, he challenges Somary’s proposed ten-billion limit on debt-consolidation loans while distinguishing their marketability from Germany’s capacity to pay reparations. His decisive contrast is concrete: proceeds spent on production or consumption place new demands on capital markets; proceeds used to repay existing debts return funds to investors. This perspective leads him to consider exchanging new securities for outstanding American debt rather than seeking fresh subscriptions. The contribution offers a compact way to think beyond headline borrowing totals: a large securities issue need not represent an equally large new demand for capital.