This brief official commission speaking turn examines the incentives created by a proposed regulation of the coal industry. Lederer advances two conditional objections: one concerns the relationship between costs and permitted returns, the other the industrial ambition invoked by Dr. Rathenau. His intervention questions whether conduct observed under exceptional circumstances would persist under more ordinary conditions.
Lederer: Ich möchte nicht aufhalten, sondern nur fragen, ob, wenn die ganz exzeptionelle Situation von heute nicht zugrunde gelegt wird, dann diese freie Disposition nicht mehr gegeben oder wenigstens eingeschränkt wäre, und ob dann nicht doch sehr stark das Argument seitens der Werke mitspielt, wir müssen doch auch zu unseren Selbstkosten einen gewissen Zuschlag bekommen, so daß dann ganz automatisch doch wieder das Interesse der Werke — man braucht da gar nicht an eine besondere Böswilligkeit zu denken — an einer Verringerung der Selbstkosten gegeben ist, weil dann der Zuschlag, der ihnen gegeben wird, doch höher ist.
English translation: Lederer: I do not wish to delay proceedings, but only to ask whether, if today's quite exceptional situation is not taken as the basis, this freedom of disposition would then no longer exist or would at least be restricted, and whether the argument advanced by the enterprises would not then play a very considerable role: we must, after all, receive a certain markup on our costs, so that the enterprises would then quite automatically again have an interest—there is no need to suppose any particular ill intent—in reducing their costs, because the markup granted to them would then be higher.
Lederer treats cost reduction as an incentive arising from the arrangement itself, without requiring malicious intentions. He then shifts from financial calculation to institutional psychology: ambition need not remain directed toward productive achievement when the governing framework changes.
Ich glaube, daß der industrielle Ehrgeiz, auf den Herr Dr. Rathenau hinwies, innerhalb der privatkapitalistischen Konzerne selbstverständlich gegeben ist; aber dann, wenn die Kohlenwirtschaft so geregelt ist, wie es hier vorgeschlagen wird, tritt dieser Ehrgeiz doch wesentlich zurück, und es könnte gerade auch der entgegengesetzte Ehrgeiz sich psychologisch einstellen, nämlich die Rationalität dieser ganzen Regelung ad absurdum zu führen.
English translation: I believe that the industrial ambition to which Dr. Rathenau referred is naturally present within private-capitalist corporate groups; but when the coal industry is regulated as proposed here, this ambition recedes considerably, and precisely the opposite ambition could also emerge psychologically, namely to demonstrate the absurdity of the rationality of this entire arrangement.
The intervention’s central move is to make motivation dependent on institutional conditions. A regulatory scheme must account not only for economic self-interest but also for the possibility that ambition will turn against the scheme itself. The excerpt does not describe the proposal sufficiently to assess its mechanics; its contribution is the pointed distinction between intended regulation and the responses it may elicit.
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