Emil Lederer: Discussion contribution on coal mining (1920)

This official commission speaking turn examines whether regulated coal pricing can discipline privately managed production. Lederer’s intervention moves from the proposed pricing mechanism to its incentives, then to the broader question of whether public regulation can achieve its aims while operational control remains private.

He asks whether the Reichskohlenrat’s definitive price setting will automatically accept production costs plus sales surcharges. His concern is not falsified accounts but inefficient management: accurate bookkeeping could still record unnecessarily high costs. If rising costs also increase profit, rewarding lower costs may be insufficient to counter the incentive created by the pricing rule.

Das läuft auf die Frage hinaus, ob eine bloße Kontrolle, eine Regulierung der Wirtschaft, welche weiter in der Hand des Privaten bleibt, der die Wirtschaftsführung weiter beherrscht, auch tatsächlich zu dem Resultat führen kann, das hier angestrebt ist.

English translation: This amounts to the question of whether mere oversight, regulation of economic activity that remains in private hands, with the private operator continuing to control its management, can actually lead to the result sought here.

Lederer thus distinguishes regulatory authority from control over management. He presents this tension as a question, not a demonstrated failure of the scheme. His concluding sentence narrows the intervention to whether oversight can detect inefficient operation undertaken for increased profit:

Aber ich möchte meine Fragen bei diesem Punkte auf die Unterfrage einschränken, ob eine Kontrolle der Selbstkosten nach der Richtung hin möglich ist, daß die Wirtschaft salopp geführt wird, um höhere Gewinne zu erzielen?

English translation: But at this point I would like to restrict my questions to the subsidiary question of whether production costs can be scrutinized to determine whether operations are being managed carelessly in order to obtain higher profits?

The contribution’s significance lies in linking cost scrutiny to managerial incentives. Recognizing reported expenditure is not equivalent to establishing that expenditure was necessary; regulation must confront that distinction if private operators retain control.