The archive.

After Bolshevik Russia retreated to the New Economic Policy, Mises saw the practical economics of the age settle on a regulated private-property order, neither laissez-faire nor outright expropriation. That third system is his target. Interventionism keeps ownership formal while replacing entrepreneurial calculation with isolated commands, and those commands, he argues, defeat their own ends: a price ceiling below the market breeds shortage, rationing, and finally compulsory production; a legislated or union-enforced wage above productivity turns frictional unemployment into a permanent institution. Corruption and evasion become structural supports rather than accidents. The postwar depression, on this reading, is not the crisis of capitalism but the crisis of interventionism, an order with no economic principle of its own, forced always to retreat or to advance toward socialism.

Entweder Kapitalismus oder Sozialismus; ein Mittelding gibt es nicht.

English translation: “Either capitalism or socialism; there is no middle way.”

Keep two things apart, Schumpeter insists, the businessman's forecasting and the scientist's theory of crises, and the whole field of Konjunkturforschung comes into focus. Prompted by the new German Institute for Business Cycle Research and by American barometer work at Harvard and Babson, this 1926 essay refuses both extremes: abstract crisis theory without data, and curve-reading without a theory of causal sequence. Collecting and charting series, he warns, is not yet prediction; indicators earn forecasting power only when arranged by their place in the wave. From Juglar's discovery that crises are phases of a recurrent cycle to Spiethoff's schema of upswing and depression, Schumpeter puts capital investment, with iron consumption as its best measurable expression, at the causal center, treating prices as mostly derivative. Better forecasting cannot abolish the cycle without harming development.

Wissenschaft dieser Art ist Praxis der Zukunft.

English translation: “Science of this kind is the practice of the future.”

Against the textbook picture of banks as mere intermediaries of prior savings, Schumpeter insists that they create purchasing power outright, and that this single fact reorganizes the theory of prices, cycles, and crises. Delivered as Bonn-period lectures after the war and peace inflations, the 1926 argument defends the return to gold less as doctrine than as an institutional brake on arbitrary monetary expansion, then treats credit-financed innovation as the engine of the boom and its self-liquidating reversal. Deliberate Kreditinflation and deflation become therapeutic tools, precise but perilous. The attached 1928 wage lecture extends the same anti-voluntarist reasoning: durable gains in workers' living standards rest on productivity and capital formation, not nominal wage pressure, which makes Germany's wage question inseparable from taxation.

Mit der Waffe bewußter, planmäßiger Kreditinflation und -deflation kann man offenbar den Pulsschlag des Wirtschaftslebens wirksam beeinflussen.

English translation: “With the weapon of conscious, planned credit inflation and deflation one can evidently influence the pulse of economic life effectively.”

The cheapest source of raw materials need not be the nearest—and its price cannot always be explained independently of the markets it serves. This interdependence drives Oskar Engländer’s critique of Alfred Weber and his proposal for a general theory of economic location. In this article, he argues that prices, production sites, and market boundaries must be explained together, rather than locating factories by transport geometry alone. His perspective also brings agriculture and industry into one analytical frame: the choice between selling nearby milk fresh and processing distant supplies into butter exposes a shared spatial problem. Readers can discover why low wages may reflect a location’s disadvantages rather than attract industry, and how distance shapes not only where goods are produced but what consumers buy.

When Oskar Engländer's Theorie des Güterverkehrs und der Frachtsätze promised to overturn transport-price theory—and criticized Sax's own Verkehrslehre in passing—Sax answered with these critical studies. He grants that lower freight costs expand a good's market and equalize prices, but denies that Engländer's mathematical formulas, resting on uniform population density and equal purchasing-power strata, can yield anything but a hypothetical sales figure detached from real markets. The heart of the dispute is Werttarifierung, value tariffing: the practice of charging higher-valued goods higher freight, which Sax defends as a genuine application of monopoly-price theory grounded in subjective value and income stratification. Against Engländer he maintains that cost sets the floor beneath every freight rate and belongs in tariff theory from the outset, and he warns that failed abstract deduction can discredit economic theory itself.

Die Rolle der Kosten im Preisbildungsprozeß ist keine ergänzende, sondern eine wesentliche.

English translation: “The role of costs in the price-formation process is not a supplementary one, but an essential one.”

A tax assessed on one person may ultimately be paid by another through higher prices or lower wages. In this 1926 conference address, preserved as an unrevised stenogram, Hans Mayer asks how abstract agreement about tax shifting can yield dependable guidance for legislation. His distinctive approach joins price theory to taxpayer motivation and the precise design of assessment: a levy on pure monopoly profit, he argues, has different consequences from one on gross receipts, while an inheritance tax may provoke less resistance than a tax on accustomed income. These distinctions underpin his challenge to the presumed fairness of a uniform general income tax. The address shows why identifying the statutory taxpayer is only the beginning of judging a tax’s distributional effects—and why the definition of the tax base matters to fiscal justice.

Useful source material need not make a convincing explanation. In this brief review of the two Valuta volumes edited by Karl Diehl and Paul Mombert, Helene Lieser separates appreciation of the readings and bibliographical guidance from criticism of their theoretical framing. She questions the central place given to balance-of-payments theory, citing objections she regards as still unrefuted. Her sharper concern is with Diehl’s introductory critique of inflation theory: it pays too little attention to how prices form and affect payment transactions. The review offers a compact glimpse of Lieser’s critical priorities in monetary economics, directing attention from the value of a collection to the causal mechanisms its organizing perspective may obscure.

Restoring a currency’s old value does not restore everyone’s purchasing power at once. In this 1926 review of Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, Emil Lederer endorses the critique of Britain’s return to gold, but gives particular weight to the sequence of adjustment: wages fall before prices, making workers pay for monetary stability. Monopoly and unequal social power, he argues, obstruct the smooth adjustment promised by abstract economic models. His distinctive move is to draw a political implication from Keynes’s proposal to make wage cuts conditional on corresponding price reductions: such an agreement would implicitly recognize workers’ claim to preserved real wages and society’s capacity to secure them. The review connects a concrete currency dispute to the possibility of deliberately shaping income distribution.

A tax’s legal name does not tell us who ultimately bears it. In these closing remarks from a 1926 conference discussion, Hans Mayer shows why even a question as apparently precise as whether land tax can be shifted requires distinctions between recipients of differential rent and marginal producers. His defence of deduction is also a statement of its limits: theory may identify how burdens move, but cannot alone measure how much falls on each participant. Mayer proposes comparing price changes with consumption and sales data, including across countries. This brief intervention offers a concrete view of the gap between legislative intention and economic incidence—and of the evidence needed to move beyond a simple verdict that a tax either is or is not shifted.

The label social liberalism promised a synthesis; Mises reads it instead as an equivocal name for anti-liberal intervention. Framed as a review of the Brentano Festgabe, the essay treats that volume as evidence that Kathedersozialismus and the Historical School have exhausted their scientific content while keeping their political influence. His wedge is ownership of the means of production: liberalism, socialism, and syndicalism are rival institutional arrangements, not moral temperaments, and property as immediate control over production is indivisible. He counts the Methodenstreit settled against the historicists, denies that unions can raise labor's income as a whole by force without cost, and portrays Max Weber breaking painfully from Prussian statism toward liberal conclusions. Socialism, he insists, foundered not on resistance but on its own impracticability.

Nationalökonomische Erkenntnis führt notwendigerweise zum Liberalismus.

English translation: “Economic understanding leads necessarily to liberalism.”

What can a people be made to pay without destroying the conditions that make future payment possible? Amid Weimar fiscal strain and the reparations debate, Schumpeter recasts tax capacity as a problem of national time rather than an accounting residue, and rejects the seductive arithmetic that takes national income, subtracts a subsistence minimum, and hands the remainder to the state. Fiscal extraction is not a neutral transfer of purchasing power; it changes conduct, and reparations cost more than their nominal sum by worsening export terms. His decisive distinction is between short emergencies, which citizens endure without changing their habits, and permanent high taxation, which reshapes savings, ambition, entrepreneurship, and capital formation. Protect saving, he urges, and load the burden onto consumption; a society cannot demand capitalist performance while suppressing capitalist motives.

Die unmittelbaren Wirkungen einer Politik oder einer bestimmten Maßregel springen in die Augen.

English translation: “The immediate effects of a policy or of a particular measure leap to the eye.”

Bankrupt firms and idle workers are political facts no government can ignore, yet Schumpeter refuses to treat postwar business stagnation as one uniform European disease, insisting that depression, inflationary aftermath, war damage, and each nation's fiscal position combine differently across Germany, Austria, England, and France. His sharpest objection to general subsidy is that a state funding relief out of the very income stream already sustaining private demand creates no new purchasing power but merely reroutes what exists. The essay's original turn takes up Alfred Mond's proposal to convert unemployment relief into employment subsidies, which Schumpeter reads not as demand stimulus but as a cheapening of labor costs that permits lower prices and greater output. He grants the risks of propping up weak firms, yet concludes the policy is no logical absurdity.

Subventionen müssen ja aus Quellen stammen, die ohnehin den Strom der Wirtschaft speisen, und wer der Wirtschaft damit aufhelfen will, erhält infolgedessen eine fatale Aehnlichkeit mit Münchhausen, der sich an seinem eigenen Zopf aus dem Sumpfe zog.

English translation: “Subsidies, after all, must come from sources that already feed the stream of the economy, and whoever wishes to help the economy in this way therefore acquires a fatal resemblance to Münchhausen, who pulled himself out of the swamp by his own pigtail.”