Alfred Amonn, Wirtschaftspolitik auf Irrwegen (1958)

Amonn’s essay argues that economic policy loses its way when it treats the market order as an instrument for political wishes that contradict its own conditions of operation. The “Irrwege” are not merely technical mistakes, but conceptual confusions: money is mistaken for real wealth, social policy is confused with egalitarian levelling, and inheritance is treated as if it were simply an arbitrary privilege available for political redesign. Against this, Amonn defends a market-economy standpoint in which policy must respect the relation between money and goods, the functional meaning of income differences, and the juridical continuity of property.

The argument moves from monetary circulation to redistribution and finally to inheritance. In the monetary discussion, Amonn insists that money cannot be assessed apart from the goods available to meet it. Purchasing power not matched by goods is not a harmless reserve of prosperity; it becomes dangerous once it enters circulation.

Dieses Geld ist im Grunde genommen „überflüssig“

English translation: This money is essentially "superfluous"

The point is not a narrow warning against one banking practice, but a broader critique of policies that imagine demand can be created independently of real supply. Money that lacks a corresponding goods basis is not productive wealth waiting to be activated; it is a disturbance in the economic circuit.

wenn es in den Kreislauf kommt, schädlich.

English translation: harmful when it enters into circulation.

This passage shows Amonn’s central conceptual move: he translates political-economic questions back into the logic of the market process. A policy may appear expansive, social, or stabilizing, but if it injects claims without goods it threatens the coordination that prices and money are meant to sustain.

The same pattern governs his treatment of distribution. Amonn sharply distinguishes social assistance from the political aim of reducing differences as such. Helping the weak may be compatible with a market order; making equality of outcome an independent objective is not.

nichts mit Hilfe an die Schwachen und Sozialpolitik zu tun

English translation: has nothing to do with aid to the weak or with social policy

For Amonn, this distinction is decisive. Social policy is legitimate when it responds to need; it becomes an “Irrweg” when it treats unequal incomes or fortunes themselves as the evil to be corrected. Such levelling is, in his words,

unter marktwirtschaftlichem Gesichtspunkt nicht zu rechtfertigende Zielsetzung

English translation: an objective that cannot be justified from a market-economy point of view

The essay’s relevance lies here: it is a postwar defence of the social limits of intervention, not a denial that society has obligations. Amonn’s claim is that the moral language of welfare can conceal a different project—the replacement of market criteria by political distributional preferences.

His discussion of inheritance extends the same argument into property law. Inheritance is presented less as a sudden windfall than as a continuation of ownership and family disposition, especially in the normal case of transfer to close heirs.

um einen Übergang auf direkte Erben handelt

English translation: it is a matter of a transfer to direct heirs

Amonn therefore resists treating inheritance chiefly as a fiscal or egalitarian target. The testamentary act matters because it expresses the owner’s continuing power of disposition within a legal order.

auf Grund einer ausdrücklichen Willenserklärung durch Testament

English translation: on the basis of an express declaration of will by testament

The work’s main thesis is thus a warning against policies that invoke social purposes while undermining the institutional grammar of a market economy. Its structure is diagnostic: money, distribution, and inheritance are separate topics, yet each illustrates the same error—abstract political aims are imposed where economic and legal relations must first be understood. Amonn’s core move is to separate genuine social protection from policies of levelling and monetary illusion. In that sense, Wirtschaftspolitik auf Irrwegen remains a concise intervention in debates over the boundary between a social market economy and an interventionist state that no longer accepts market-economic discipline.