Markus Ettinger · 1892
Ettinger’s monograph is a social-political intervention in Austria-Hungary’s projected currency reform. Dedicated to Carl Menger, it joins monetary theory, statistical argument, and class analysis. Its central claim is that adopting gold is not a neutral technical improvement: if the gold gulden is fixed too high, or if gold itself continues to appreciate, reform becomes a hidden redistribution from producers, debtors, workers, and taxpayers toward creditors and secure capital.
The first part turns on a contrast between wholesale and retail adjustment. Export and wholesale markets respond quickly to dearer money because international competition forces prices downward. Ordinary consumers, however, face rents, food, transport, and shop prices that fall slowly or not at all. Thus declining commodity prices do not necessarily mean cheaper life for wage earners or small producers.
Die Engrospreise passen sich an den steigenden Geldwert oder den schwereren Goldgulden an, indem sie entsprechend sinken, — die Consum- oder Detailpreise nicht.
English translation: Wholesale prices adjust to the rising value of money, or to the heavier gold gulden, by falling accordingly — consumer or retail prices do not.
From this asymmetry Ettinger derives the book’s social diagnosis. Large industry loses competitiveness; small industry is pressed between falling receipts and sticky costs; retail trade may first gain wider margins but later suffers from overcrowding and weakened demand. Workers bear the sharpest burden, because employment and wages react faster than the prices of necessities. Currency policy therefore enters the household through food, rent, illness, migration, child mortality, and the forced sale of small property.
Es gibt oft auch in Wirtschaftsgesetzen eine gewisse Ironie, die ein gegen menschliches Elend nicht gleichgiltiges Gemüth mit Unbehagen erfüllen muss, und eine solche liegt in dem Umstande, dass gerade Leben, Gesundheit und materielle Wohlfahrt derjenigen Bevölkerungsclassen am meisten von den Eigenschaften einer Währung abhängt, die am wenigsten über Geldmittel verfügen.
English translation: There is often a certain irony in economic laws which cannot fail to fill a mind not indifferent to human misery with unease: namely, that it is precisely the life, health, and material welfare of those classes of the population which possess the fewest monetary means that depend most heavily upon the properties of a currency.
Agriculture is treated in the same distributive frame. Mortgaged landowners experience appreciation of money as an increase in real debt and taxation; agricultural labourers suffer when landowners cut costs. Rentiers with secure claims may gain, but small rentiers and the state are not simply beneficiaries, because falling production, falling interest, and weakened taxable capacity can injure public finance itself.
The second part grounds this argument in value theory. Ettinger distinguishes value, price, and exchange rate, rejecting the assumption that the London silver quotation or the bill rate on London measures the Austrian gulden’s domestic purchasing power. Gold, before monetization in Austria, does not have the same use-value there as in gold-standard countries; conversion itself changes the field in which value is formed.
Wert ist jene Eigenschaft¹) einer Sache, welche in den Menschen das Verlangen weckt, dieselbe unter Ausschliessung anderer Menschen unter ihre Herrschaft zu bringen.
English translation: Value is that property¹) of a thing which awakens in men the desire to bring it under their dominion to the exclusion of other men.
This leads him to reverse the conventional narrative of the post-1870 monetary world. The apparent “fall” of silver is, for Ettinger, largely the rise of gold under enlarged monetary demand. Both bimetallism at an artificial old ratio and hasty gold conversion at an unfavourable relation mistake market quotation for social value. A just reform must preserve what the existing gulden buys inside Austria, not reward foreign creditors or bankers by translating a weak exchange rate into a heavier domestic standard.
Wir können also auf Grund der deductiven Untersuchung behaupten, dass der Wert des Silbers eher gestiegen als gefallen ist und dass eine Verschiebung der Relation nur durch Verteuerung des Goldes hervorgerufen wurde.
English translation: On the basis of deductive investigation we can therefore assert that the value of silver has risen rather than fallen, and that any shift in the ratio has been caused solely by the appreciation of gold.
The concluding policy is cautious rather than anti-modern. Ettinger can accept eventual gold monometallism only if the state first prevents gold appreciation from becoming a social tax. He proposes discreet accumulation of gold and bills, preliminary use of gold in state payments, and final fixation only after the bullion relation stabilizes. The book’s enduring force lies in its insistence that monetary law be judged by production, labour, and class survival, not by metallic prestige or banking convenience.
This work was divided into 22 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 22 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian