Emil Lederer · 1921
This recorded commission intervention challenges the institutional machinery proposed for municipalization. Lederer questions whether placing a Reich Economic Council commission at the scheme’s pivotal point would produce an authority sympathetic to its purpose:
Mir scheint die ganze Konstruktion mit der Kommission des Reichswirtschaftsrats sehr gekünstelt zu sein, wobei an den Knotenpunkt die Kommission des Reichswirtschaftsrats gesetzt wird, der weiß Gott keine Instanz sein wird, der für die Kommunalisierung viel übrig hat.
English translation: The whole arrangement involving the commission of the Reich Economic Council seems very artificial to me, with the commission of the Reich Economic Council placed at the pivotal point; God knows, it will not be an authority with much sympathy for municipalization.
His objection moves from institutional design to the distribution of influence. Acknowledging the legitimate weight of interested parties does not mean trusting majority voting to resolve their differences:
Es ist wohl wieder das Gewicht der Interessenten, selbstverständlich mit Recht, im Reichswirtschaftsrat sehr groß und würde es auch in dieser Kommission sein, so daß ich mir kaum vorstelle, daß, wenn zufällig ein Schuhmacherarbeiter, ein Oberbürgermeister, ein Nationalökonom und zwei Unternehmer delegiert sein sollten, durch Mehrheitsbeschlüsse entschieden werden könnte.
English translation: Once again, the weight of the interested parties in the Reich Economic Council is presumably very great—quite rightly, of course—and would also be so in this commission, so that I can scarcely imagine that, if a shoemaker worker, a mayor, an economist and two entrepreneurs happened to be delegated, decisions could be reached by majority vote.
The hypothetical membership makes his concern concrete: occupational, municipal, scholarly, and entrepreneurial representation does not itself establish a workable decision-making body. The intervention’s significance lies in distinguishing representative composition from effective authority; it offers a compact institutional criticism, without developing an alternative arrangement.
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