Felix Somary, Die finanzielle Durchführung einer einmaligen Vermögensabgabe (1918)

Felix Somary’s 1918 work is a policy-technical treatise on executing a one-time capital levy for the German Reich after the war. It begins from the unprecedented scale of a possible levy of a fifth or quarter of national wealth, notes objections to its incidence and administrative danger, and then deliberately narrows the question to practicable financial construction.

Ich will nicht die Frage untersuchen, ob sich die Auslegung einer Vermögensabgabe für Deutschland staatsfinanziell rechtfertigen läßt, sondern mich ausschließlich auf das Problem der Durchführung der Vermögensabgabe beschränken.

English translation: I do not wish to examine the question whether the imposition of a capital levy can be justified for Germany on grounds of public finance, but shall restrict myself exclusively to the problem of carrying out the capital levy.

The main thesis is that a levy can work only as a managed conversion of wealth: it must avoid forced liquidation, protect productive activity, withdraw inflationary money, and transfer capital to the Reich through verifiable procedures. Somary therefore treats the postwar fiscal problem as a balance-sheet problem, connecting public credit, monetary stabilization, settlement policy, and the fate of war loans.

Steigerung der Produktivität, Rückstauung der Geldinflation, umfassende Kapitalübertragung von Privaten an das Reich bei einfachster, möglichst vollständig kontrollierbarer Veranlagung, das sind die Ziele, die bei Durchführung der Vermögensabgabe erreicht werden müssen.

English translation: Enhancement of productivity, the reversal of monetary inflation, and a comprehensive transfer of capital from private hands to the Reich by means of the simplest and most fully verifiable assessment—these are the aims that must be achieved in carrying out the capital levy.

The structure follows asset classes. Agricultural land is central because it can be both taxed and reorganized. Somary lets the Reich choose between payment in kind and priority land charges, using commissions to prevent owners from unloading only inconvenient assets. Land taken in kind would be sold or leased, especially to war invalids and survivors, thereby reducing pension burdens, limiting urban proletarianization, and raising rural productivity. His valuation control is simple: owners declare value, but the Reich may take land at that declared value.

Bei landwirtschaftlichem Grund und Boden scheint es mir am zweckmäßigsten, die Vermögensabgabe entweder durch Naturalleistung oder durch Auferlegung von Grundschulden entrichten zu lassen.

English translation: In the case of agricultural land, it seems to me most expedient to have the capital levy discharged either through payment in kind or through the imposition of land charges.

For urban land and houses the same logic leads to charges and occasional natural transfer, but the technical core is banking. A National Ground-Charge Bank would issue Pfandbriefe on priority land charges; a National Securities and Industrial Bank would issue four classes of obligations on fixed-income securities, factory mortgages, domestic shares and participations, and foreign securities. Exchanged against war loans, these privately backed instruments would reduce Reich debt and lower capital-market rates without an open coercive conversion.

Es könnte die Frage nach der Berechtigung privaten Aktienkapitals und des damit verbundenen Dividendenbezuges aufgeworfen werden; das Kapital ist nötig, um der Bank eine rein private Grundlage zu geben, sie von jeder Form der Reichsgarantie unabhängig zu machen; würde Reichsgarantie in Anspruch genommen, so wäre ein wichtiger mit der Gründung der Bank verfolgter Zweck — der Umwandlung der Reichsschuld in Privatverpflichtungen — vereitelt.

English translation: The question could be raised as to the justification of private share capital and the associated receipt of dividends; the capital is necessary in order to give the bank a purely private foundation and to make it independent of any form of Reich guarantee; were a Reich guarantee to be called upon, an important purpose pursued in founding the bank—the conversion of Reich debt into private obligations—would be thwarted.

Cash is accordingly marginal, not normal. When paid, it should retire Treasury bills and short bank credits; more often, assets are surrendered in payment and transformed into negotiable claims. Taxpayers may nominate assets, but the Reich may demand specific ones for foreign payments, settlement, or future monopolies. Goodwill is normally deferred, while corporations should pay directly rather than through shareholders, making share concealment and accidental market-price distortions less dangerous.

Immerhin wird die Barzahlung bei der Vermögensabgabe nur die Nebenrolle, die Leistung an Zahlungsstatt die Hauptrolle spielen müssen.

English translation: In any case, cash payment can only play a subsidiary role in the capital levy, while payment in lieu (performance in kind) must play the principal role.

The final conceptual move is a rejection of fiscal co-ownership as economic policy. Somary allows state monopolies where they are simple and productive, but argues that minority participation in enterprises would produce neither real control nor free enterprise: it would draw the state into cartel prices, investment approvals, and a new bureaucracy, weakening the postwar initiative he wants to preserve.

Soll nicht die Wirtschaft den Staat und der Staat die Wirtschaft korrompieren, so muß das Gebiet des Staatsmonopols und das der Privatunternehmung vorerst getrennt bleiben.

English translation: If the economy is not to corrupt the state and the state the economy, then the sphere of state monopoly and that of private enterprise must for the time being remain separate.

The work’s relevance lies in this combination of emergency taxation and financial engineering. It imagines the levy as a disciplined operation to rescue public credit, stabilize money, favor war-loan holders, preserve liquidity, and reshape selected property relations only where productivity or state necessity demands it. Its politics are conservative-modernizing: strong intervention, but through valuation controls, private banking forms, tradable securities, and a strict boundary between fiscal extraction and socialist management.