Richard Kerschagl · 1958
Richard Kerschagl’s review presents Amonn’s book as an intellectually serious, accessible case for returning to a market economy. Its structure moves from a general assessment to three policy questions of particular Austrian relevance—popular share ownership, tenant protection, and agriculture—before endorsing Amonn’s warning about the cumulative advance of collectivism. Kerschagl’s central judgment is strongly affirmative: most of Amonn’s positions, he maintains, withstand logical and empirical scrutiny, although the review chiefly illustrates rather than independently tests them.
Kerschagl distinguishes accessibility from intellectual dilution. Although Amonn dispenses with the scholarly apparatus of references, he retains the seriousness of economic argument:
Es ist populär, ohne in Vulgärökonomie zu verfallen.
English translation: It is popular without lapsing into vulgar economics.
This approval is qualified by doubts about Amonn’s selection of exemplary economic writers, especially where those writers have changed their views. The reservation concerns his authorities rather than the substance of his market-oriented, anti-collectivist position.
The three policy examples give that position institutional specificity. Discussing the Volksaktie, Kerschagl highlights Amonn’s opposition to non-voting shares: widening ownership should preserve the rights and economic characteristics of genuine equity. In housing, the review reproduces Amonn’s indictment of tenant protection as worsening shortages, misallocating accommodation, inhibiting labour mobility, consuming economic capital, and privileging older occupants over younger people. The conceptual reversal is important: measures defended as correctives to market injustice are presented as obstacles to an equitable and productive allocation of resources.
Agricultural policy receives the longest treatment. Here the argument begins by challenging the apparent unity of “agriculture” and the farmer as objects of protection:
Den 'bäuerlichen Menschen' gibt es in concreto nicht und 'die bäuerliche Arbeit' kann von sehr verschiedener Qualifikation sein und demgemäß zu sehr verschiedenen Erfolgen führen.
English translation: The 'peasant person' does not exist in concrete reality, and 'peasant labour' can vary greatly in skill and accordingly lead to very different results.
By foregrounding differences among producers, Amonn contests the claim that an entire sector suffers a common disadvantage requiring exceptional treatment. Kerschagl’s extended quotation follows the consequences: withdrawing protection would close or absorb marginal farms and remove some land from cultivation, while surviving enterprises could reorganize through market-compatible measures. Dutch and Danish agriculture supply examples of prosperity attributed to organization and technique rather than decisive natural advantages. Lower production costs and food prices would, Amonn argues, release purchasing power for other needs and reduce the burdens imposed on consumers through prices and taxation. The review thus connects sectoral restructuring to general welfare, while acknowledging the disappearance of some individual enterprises.
The conclusion enlarges these policy criticisms into a theory of cumulative intervention. Kerschagl praises Amonn’s courage and locates him within the surviving intellectual world of Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk. He especially endorses the logic of Amonn’s final warning:
Es ist nun einmal so, daß eine Intervention nach der andern ruft, eine weitere nach sich zieht und dabei nicht abzusehen ist, wo es vor der vollständigen Kollektivierung eine Grenze geben kann.
English translation: The fact is that one intervention calls for another, brings a further one in its wake, and it is impossible to foresee where there could be a limit short of complete collectivization.
The decisive move is from measuring the existing extent of intervention to interpreting its direction of development. What appears to be a limited correction becomes, in this account, a process generating further controls. The review’s relevance lies in its sympathetic presentation of this market-liberal critique within concrete postwar policy disputes: Kerschagl makes Amonn’s book significant both for its attacks on particular protections and for its claim that their cumulative logic threatens the market order itself.
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