Richard Reisch’s lecture of 5 February 1919 presents the financial crisis of Deutsch-Österreich as the central problem of republican reconstruction. Its governing claim is that fiscal repair cannot be isolated from the whole economic and political order. Finance depends on production, credit, trade, currency, and social policy, yet the emergency is so severe that financial policy will also shape the new state’s political direction.
daß die Finanzpolitik nur als Glied der allgemeinen Politik und Wirtschaftsverfassung behandelt werden kann
English translation: that financial policy can be treated only as a member of general policy and the economic constitution
Reisch situates the republic within a tax state based on private property, but he does not defend laissez-faire. Insurance monopolies, cartel arrangements, and state participation in trade may provide revenues where ordinary taxation is exhausted. Yet he rejects the socialization of banks and mines from an administrative criterion: risky, initiative-dependent enterprises would suffer under bureaucratic management, whereas routinized monopolies may serve the treasury.
The lecture’s core concerns public credit, currency, and taxation. Reisch’s image of postwar finance is architectural: after the earthquake of war and imperial collapse, the financial builder must inspect the foundations, strengthen the supports, and tolerate a temporary emergency roof. The deepest foundation is state credit. War loans and paper money both rested on the state; therefore a collapse of confidence would endanger not merely rentiers but savings banks, insurance funds, cooperatives, and workers’ reserves.
Der Staatskredit bildete sohin weit mehr als in normalen Zeiten das Rückgrat der gesamten Volkswirtschaft
English translation: State credit thus formed, far more than in normal times, the backbone of the entire national economy.
His criticism of the war-loan panic follows from this premise. A run required payment, liquidity, and reassurance; instead the ministry was silent and the Austro-Hungarian Bank resisted Lombard obligations. Panic turned consolidated debt back into floating note debt and thereby intensified inflation. Reisch’s defense of credit is thus social as well as fiscal: once public credit breaks, the damage crosses class lines and reaches the whole productive organism.
His treatment of currency rejects the illusion that a small import-dependent state can sustain a purely domestic paper standard. The breakup of the common currency makes debt allocation, bank separation, and reform unavoidable; stamping notes may be necessary, but only as a simplified emergency expedient. Money’s basic task is not national self-expression but stable measurement.
Die elementarste Aufgabe, die dem Gelde gestellt ist, liegt darin, einen stabilen Wertmesser zu bilden
English translation: The most elementary task set for money lies in constituting a stable measure of value.
Because depreciation has already redistributed wealth, restoring the prewar Krone would produce another violent redistribution, especially intolerable for the indebted state. Reisch therefore expects some devaluation at reform, however regrettable. Stabilization also requires ending state reliance on the note press and rebuilding reserves through foreign credit. Here he is explicit about the practical conditions: Austria must sell dispensable assets, borrow abroad, and permit profitable foreign investment. His example is water power, where foreign-financed development is preferable to delay, coal dependence, and industrial backwardness.
The final section turns against the Austrian tendency to reduce finance to taxation.
Finanzpolitik darf sich keineswegs in Steuerpolitik erschöpfen.
English translation: Financial policy must by no means exhaust itself in tax policy.
Reisch condemns a formalistic tax practice that misses wartime gains while multiplying retroactive and overlapping statutes. Especially dangerous are anti-capital measures that threaten Vienna’s role as banking, exchange, and managerial center for enterprises across the successor states. The Steuerfluchtgesetz is his prime example: controls over letters, postal payments, bills, and foreign banking may seek revenue security, but they paralyze the external commerce on which recovery depends.
Yet Reisch is not an opponent of taxing wealth. He accepts substantial wealth taxation, even a one-time levy, if it is openly prepared, objectively administered, and avoids double taxation of corporations and shareholders. Direct taxes must be supplemented by turnover and mass taxes, monopolies, cartels, and state participation. The lecture refuses numerical prophecy because borders, debt shares, budgets, and currency arrangements remain unsettled. Its lasting importance lies in its early republican theory of reconstruction: restore confidence, preserve productive organs, reopen foreign trade, and avoid radical fiscal surgery until the patient has first been strengthened.
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