Alfred Amonn · 1942
Amonn’s wartime essay treats war economy as a transformation of the whole economic order, not as a military sector added to an otherwise normal peace economy. Its argument begins from a simple premise: war creates disturbances that cannot be mastered by ordinary peacetime categories or by a single anti-inflation rule.
Außergewöhnliche Störungen, wie sie ein Krieg für die Wirtschaft bedeutet, erfordern außergewöhnliche, über das Schema in Friedenszeiten hinausgehende Mittel und Massnahmen zu deren Behebung.
English translation: Extraordinary disturbances such as a war imposes upon the economy require extraordinary means and measures for their remedy, going beyond the pattern of peacetime.
The opening theoretical discussion clarifies what war disrupts. Economic life begins in needs, scarcity, production, income, and exchange; money is not the source of the process but the circulating medium through which it is maintained. Prices therefore have a double role. They direct production toward effective demand and distribute goods among income groups. For that reason, price policy is indispensable in wartime, but also dangerous if it suppresses the signals by which production adapts.
Die Preise bilden so den ökonomischen und sozialen Verteilungsschlüssel.
English translation: Prices thus form the economic and social key of distribution.
Amonn’s central move is to reject any static division between peace economy and war economy. War changes the entire circular flow: public military demand rises, civilian supplies contract, imports become uncertain, labor is withdrawn, and incomes are redistributed. The problem is therefore not to preserve the old circulation unchanged, but to form a new wartime circulation with the least waste and social damage.
die „Kriegswirtschaft“ ist ebenso die ganze Volkswirtschaft wie die „Friedenswirtschaft“
English translation: The "war economy" is just as much the whole national economy as is the "peace economy."
This perspective shapes his treatment of rationing and price control. If prices are left free, necessities become dearer and poorer households are excluded from adequate consumption. If prices are fixed without rationing, excess demand and shortages follow. Amonn therefore regards rationing and price ceilings as necessary for essential goods, especially where social subsistence and military supply are at stake. But he also warns that general suppression of purchasing power can damage sectors that still have goods to sell and cannot easily shift into military or essential production.
His monetary theory similarly complicates simple doctrines. Inflation is not every increase in money, but an excess of circulation over the transaction needs of the economy. Conversely, removing purchasing power too aggressively can produce deflationary unemployment and unused capacity. A purely tax-financed war budget may avoid one danger only by creating another.
Aber man geriete dann von der Scylla der Inflation unvermeidlich in die Charybdis der Deflation.
English translation: But one would then inevitably pass from the Scylla of inflation into the Charybdis of deflation.
Amonn’s fiscal conclusion is therefore mixed and functional. Loans are acceptable when they mobilize genuine savings; taxes are necessary to absorb excess purchasing power and capture war gains; neither instrument is automatically sound or unsound. The criterion is whether finance sustains production while preventing uncontrolled price rises. Against views that make inflation prevention the supreme aim, he insists that war policy must first preserve and redirect national productive forces.
Wage policy follows the same logic. Since necessities become scarcer, real wages may fall even without monetary inflation. A general wage rise would intensify demand for scarce goods, but leaving lower-income workers below subsistence would undermine labor power and social stability. Amonn therefore favors targeted support, wage supplements, controlled funds, and selective redistribution rather than uniform nominal increases.
The discussion of foreign trade extends the argument to Switzerland’s position as an import-dependent neutral economy. War worsens supply conditions and exchange relations, making domestic substitution, agricultural expansion, and planned import priorities unavoidable. The practical program that emerges is coordinated: ration necessities, control key prices, tax war profits and luxury consumption, finance through savings-backed loans and selective taxation, protect subsistence wages, rationalize production, and direct foreign trade toward indispensable imports. Amonn’s lasting point is that wartime policy must manage inflationary and deflationary dangers together, because war reorganizes the economy as a whole.
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