Richard Strigl, Einzelinteressen oder Gemeinwohl als Ziel der Wirtschaftspolitik (1933)

Opening with Mandeville and Adam Smith, Strigl’s 1933 essay is a crisis-era Austrian critique of economic policy that dresses sectional rescue in the language of the common good. It is not a blanket rejection of all intervention: he brackets harmless measures, genuinely public measures, and even cases where public aims override private interests. His target is the fourth case, in which firms, sectors, workers attached to them, municipalities, or creditors are protected at the cost of the wider order. The thesis is that policy mistakes organized private interests for the common good when it ignores economic interdependence.

von ihrer Bedachtnahme auf ihr eigenes Interesse.

English translation: from their regard for their own interest.

This reference to Adam Smith is decisive because Strigl separates market self-interest from political privilege. The butcher, brewer, or baker serves others by seeking gain in exchange; the pressure group seeks gain by asking the state to shift losses onto others. In the first section Strigl shows how a firm’s property interest—preserving value, sales, prices, cheap inputs, and cheap money—expands into a social claim once employees, the town, and local tradesmen are affected. The wider the circle, the easier it becomes to misrecognize rescue as public policy.

The second section applies the argument to trade. Protectionism speaks in the idiom of national labor:

„Jede nationale Arbeit hat Anspruch auf Schutz.“

English translation: “Every branch of national labor has a claim to protection.”

Strigl asks whether protection of one domestic activity protects work as such. His answer is no. If a German bowling club buys Pilsner instead of Munich beer, the money paid abroad will return through banks, purchases of German goods, or investment. The German brewers may lose work, but another branch receives demand. Import barriers therefore shift employment while raising the protected good’s price. They also damage producers who use dearer inputs, consumers whose real wages fall, and industries facing higher wage and production costs.

Der Vorteil des einen wird zum Nachteil der vielen anderen.

English translation: The advantage of the one becomes the disadvantage of the many others.

Autarky, import bans, and quotas merely enlarge this fallacy by identifying existing producers with national work. Strigl’s historical appeal is brief but pointed: rising prosperity has accompanied expanding trade, from Italian cities and the Hanse to Holland, England, Germany, and Austria before the crisis. Even for those who value wealth only as the basis of higher cultural ends, he argues, the suppression of international exchange cannot serve the whole.

The second example is capital. A healthy firm reproduces capital through sale of its product; a failing firm that sells only at a loss consumes capital. If political pressure on banks or central-bank help keeps it alive, no new real capital is created. Without inflation, funds are diverted from enterprises that might have reproduced them and provided continuing employment. With credit expansion, the result is inflation, whatever it is called. Strigl therefore defends the interest rate as an allocative and selective device: it sends scarce liquid capital toward higher-yielding uses and can force liquidation of immobilized capital. Cheap money benefits first recipients; the public bears the cost.

The final section generalizes the pattern to taxes, monopolies, and barriers against competition. The deepest error is to see the economy as an aggregate of separable units rather than a system of mutual conditioning:

Die Volkswirtschaft ist nicht eine Summe von Einzelwirtschaften, welche unabhängig voneinander nebeneinander stehen

English translation: The national economy is not a sum of individual economies standing independently side by side

For this reason, intervention that preserves existing interests is anti-selectionist. It blocks adaptation when changed circumstances require a reconstruction of production. Strigl’s relevance lies in his Depression diagnosis: distress multiplies demands for special measures; those measures deepen distress; the deeper crisis then calls forth more intervention. He names this dynamic:

Eine gefährliche Schraube ohne Ende.

English translation: A dangerous screw without end.

Strigl offers no full philosophical definition of the common good, but in 1933 he takes enlarged opportunities for work as its urgent test. Measures that reduce them must be refused, however compelling the protected group appears. Economic policy must ask whether a measure serves the whole or merely visible claimants:

jede Maßnahme der Wirtschaftspolitik eine Prüfung in strengster Sachlichkeit erfordert

English translation: every measure of economic policy demands examination with the strictest objectivity

The essay gives a compact account of protectionism, bailouts, monopoly favors, and inflationary credit as disguised particularism. Its core moves are to distinguish market self-interest from state-backed privilege, to translate every visible rescue into displaced burdens, and to treat capital as scarce rather than administratively creatable. Giving some what is taken from others, Strigl concludes, cannot create better provision or more work; it harms the whole while speaking in its name.