The archive.

Can monetary policy relieve a depression without preparing the next crisis? In this 1934 German essay, also intended as the preface to the forthcoming English edition of his monetary treatise, Ludwig von Mises tests promises of recovery against their deferred costs. His defense of gold is not a claim to monetary perfection: he distinguishes the damage caused by Britain’s chosen restoration parity from the gold standard itself, and regards dependence on gold production as less dangerous than political control of currency values. Particularly revealing is his extension of monetary reform into international law: secure lending, he argues, requires enforceable protections against unilateral national interference. The essay connects currency policy to the security of contracts and access to foreign savings, while insisting that neither devaluation nor credit expansion can substitute for capital formation.

History offers no mechanical template for the slump of the early 1930s, yet Schumpeter mines it anyway, 1896, 1825, 1873, for the recurring anatomy of capitalist crisis. Depressions return, he argues, because development repeatedly breeds maladjustments that must be worked out: prosperity brings new methods, firms, and products that displace the old, so the downturn is destructive and reconstructive at once, the means of rebuilding the system on a more efficient plan. Speculation is the visible break, not the cause. But every real crisis is also shaped from outside, and what makes the present one different is not scale but politics, war debts, economic nationalism, gold-standard obstruction, wage and interest policy, so that the drama is dominated less by the mechanism of capitalism than by nations bent on obstructing it. His prescription discriminates: relieve suffering, remove political injuries, but never mistake credit-driven revival for genuine recovery.

What we face is not merely the working of capitalism, but of a capitalism which nations are determined not to allow to function.

Economic theory cannot tell a government which ends to pursue, since those belong to value and politics, yet no rational policy is possible without it. From this double thesis Morgenstern develops the "application problem" at the heart of his 1934 study, reprinted here in the original German: because economics lacks physics-like constants and works through shifting relations, every intervention rests on contested theoretical beliefs about cause and effect. He shows how policy effects scatter unevenly, concentrated and visible losses outweighing dispersed future gains, so organized producers systematically outmaneuver diffuse consumers. Since measures interlock through the price system, the only value-free scientific principle he can offer is consistency, freedom from contradiction. Drawing on Böhm-Bawerk, he treats power as widening the zone of indeterminacy rather than abolishing economic law, and closes with a withering account of the "Vulgärökonomie" of slogans and patent remedies.

Eine flackernde Fackel ist völliger Finsternis vorzuziehen.

English translation: “A flickering torch is preferable to complete darkness.”

No law exists in the abstract, only particular styles of law thrown up by interlocking social conditions: so runs the thesis of this fifth volume of Thurnwald's ethno-sociology of human society. Surveying blood revenge, property, contract, suretyship, inheritance, crime, composition, outlawry, asylum, punishment, and the evidentiary machinery of oath, ordeal, and duel, he locates the psychological root of justice in reciprocity, reading vengeance, compensation, and Wergeld as balanced returns. Blood revenge among sovereign kin groups becomes the seedbed of criminal law, giving way to objective justice only when an authority stands above the parties. Contract moves from symbolic real acts through curse-bound words to consensual agreement under writing and the state. Law's whole development, he concludes, is an act of human self-domestication.

Das primitive Recht kennt keine anderen Beweismittel als Eid, Fluch und Gottesurteil.

English translation: “Primitive law knows no other means of proof than oath, curse, and ordeal.”

Public finance, on this account, is an economic science of the state rather than a technical appendix to tax law—and a theory of taxation that does not begin from the state, Kerschagl writes, is nonsense. His Steuerlehre reads economy, law, coercion, and political purpose together, tracing modern taxation from older real, property, and consumption levies to the fragile arrival of income taxation, which interwar inflation and administrative weakness kept unstable. He dismantles equivalence and insurance theories that assimilate taxes to private exchange, insists that in principle every tax is shiftable, and rejects the tidy contrast between direct and indirect taxes as an account of who ultimately pays. No ideal tax exists in the abstract; a workable system must fit production, property, and constitutional order, as his comparative surveys and Austria's 1934 financial constitution show.

Das Urteil über die Produktivität der Steuern ist in Wirklichkeit ein Urteil über die Produktivität des Staates.

English translation: “The judgment on the productivity of taxes is in reality a judgment on the productivity of the state.”

Confronted with Depression-era watchwords that promised quick relief—Ankurbelung, work-sharing, autarky, debt cancellation, demurrage money—this guide for the educated layman tests each against the interdependence of prices, costs, and capital. Machlup argues that credit expansion can simulate revival but, unmatched by real saving, only sustains investments the crisis has already condemned; that unemployment is at bottom a problem of enterprise profitability, not of a fixed quantity of work to be divided; and that protection granted to any branch of production is a national sacrifice paid by consumers and other producers. Defending gold as a restraint on discretionary credit and saving against consumptionist fashion, he closes on the socialist calculation problem: lacking market prices for production goods, no central plan can reckon. First published in Vienna in 1934.

Das Problem der Arbeitslosigkeit ist zur Hauptsache ein Problem der Rentabilität der Unternehmen.

English translation: “The problem of unemployment is, in the main, a problem of the profitability of enterprises.”

How do comparative advantages become the money-price differences that actually direct exports? This is a central test Gottfried Haberler applies to R. F. Harrod’s International Economics in his 1934 review. Admiring the book’s originality, Haberler nevertheless finds its trade theory insufficiently connected to its account of monetary adjustment. His criticism turns on concrete mechanisms: changing factor valuations, the timing of receipts and expenditures, and increased demand in countries receiving international transfers. He also tests managed-currency proposals against the conflicting demands of domestic price stability, fixed exchanges, and protectionist politics. The review offers a compact encounter with Haberler’s insistence that analytical ingenuity must explain how adjustment occurs—and why monetary management cannot simply remove rigidities in wages and other costs.

Abolishing private ownership would not settle how much leather should go into shoes or how resources should be divided between agriculture and railways. In this 1934 newspaper article, Wilhelm Röpke shifts the dispute over capitalism from intentions to the practical means of choosing among competing needs. His objection to comprehensive planning grants administrators intelligence and integrity but questions how they could calculate without market valuations. Yet his defence of markets is conditional: purchasing power is unequal, monopoly severs profit from performance, and capitalists themselves may evade competition or shift losses onto society. The article makes a precise distinction available to readers: preserving the coordinating work of prices need not mean endorsing every existing distribution of wealth or excluding public enterprise and redistribution.

Problems of production must be approached first through the real relations of goods, Strigl argues, and only then through the veil of money — the reverse of the usual procedure. Published in the Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie in 1934, this essay reconstructs capital as a wage fund: a stock of subsistence goods that carries workers through the roundabout processes of production, bound into intermediate goods by investment and released again as finished consumer goods. He reconciles the old wage-fund doctrine with marginal-productivity theory through the interest rate, which regulates the length of production, and then turns to money capital as an independent factor. Drawing on the Wicksell-Mises circulation-credit theory, he shows how bank credit finances longer processes without a matching subsistence fund, tearing apart the structure of production until liquidation forces a crisis.

Die unzureichende Freisetzung von Kapital in der Gestalt von Fertigprodukten muß Anlaß zur Krise werden.

English translation: “The insufficient release of capital in the form of finished products must become the occasion of a crisis.”

Economic theory can expose the costs of protecting a factory or an occupational group—but can it decide whether those costs are worth bearing? In this 1934 review of Oskar Morgenstern’s Die Grenzen der Wirtschaftspolitik, Martha Stephanie Braun accepts that political ends need not coincide with maximum material welfare, while defending liberalism’s attention to the interconnected effects of policy. Her disagreement turns on the difference between deliberately accepting economic losses and imagining that intervention can escape its consequences. She also rejects the inference that governmental independence from sectional interests requires authoritarian rule. The review offers a compact encounter between liberal economic analysis and practical political choice: theory cannot select society’s ends, yet policymakers remain responsible for understanding what their chosen means will do.

In Buin, shell currency could secure pigs, pigs could furnish feasts, and feasts could turn wealth into standing. Richard C. Thurnwald’s 1934 article follows these connections to ask how calculation and profit operate within relationships of kinship, dependence, and reciprocal obligation. Drawing on fieldwork in Bougainville and comparison with his earlier observations, he describes chiefs who lend valuables, households reluctant to slaughter their own pigs, and wealthy men whose exchange skills challenge hereditary rank. The tension is concrete: circulation sustains authority but also gives others the means to contest it. His account lets readers examine the transactions behind his proposed pig-based standard of value, while distinguishing those observations from his more conjectural explanations of currency’s origins and social development.

An economist need not be an original thinker to shape generations of administrators. In this brief encyclopedia entry, first published in 1934 and reprinted here in 1954, Karl Pribram explains Karl Heinrich Rau’s influence through the teaching framework of his textbook: economic principles, economic policy, and public finance. Pribram distinguishes the authority of this synthesis from theoretical innovation, locating Rau’s more enduring contribution in his insistence that expenditure and taxation be judged by their effects on production and economic well-being. The entry offers a compact account of how textbook organization and fiscal reasoning can leave a legacy beyond an economist’s waning doctrinal influence.