Feb

21

Via the Mises blog:

"The Vampire Economy, by Guenter Reimann (1939), is a rare and wonderful thing. It is a detailed account of how the Nazis crushed the private sector and hamstrung the economy with vast regulations, violations of property rights, inflation, price controls, and taxes."

The book is a 12Mb pdf, with 366 pages. It is one of the most powerful volumes I have ever read. Long tracts of it read like the middle chapters of Atlas Shrugged.

Excerpts as follows:

The capitalist under fascism has to be not merely a law-abiding citizen, he must be servile to the representatives of the State. He must not insist on "rights" and must not behave as if his private property rights were still sacred. He should be grateful to the Fuehrer that he still has private property. [Page 20]

Private speculation has not disappeared, but it operates almost entirely outside of the official Stock Exchange. The greater part of the sales and purchases of stocks and bonds is executed at quotations which depend on individual arrangements and which often differ greatly from the official quotations on the Stock Exchange.

State Commissar Martini of the Berlin Stock Exchange complained that instructions for control of the sales of securities "turned out to be ineffectual in practice."

The office for the listing of new securities, he said, is of no use if "an increasing number of the most respectable companies fail to have their securities listed because they fear the inconvenience of a far-reaching disclosure of their situation, and want to save the cost of listing on the Stock Exchange. . . . Disadvantages of not having an official listing are so slight that they are disregarded. . . . There are innumerable independent brokers for transactions in unlisted securities . . . satisfied with market reports, the publication of which is not yet forbidden. The securities business has therefore largely circumvented the Stock Exchange Law and follows its own easier course. Even companies of high standing are willing to sell their securities in the free market without official listing on the Exchange. The embargo on new issues has favored this development. There is still a third kind of securities business, the so called telephone business conducted over the telephone. It avoids all control. The volume of business done by telephone sometimes exceeds all other securities transactions." [Page 179]

The bureaucracy of the Nazi State is a special phenomenon. It is like a huge and growing incubus living off the body politic and becoming more parasitic as it increases in size and numbers… [Page 292]

The middle item above startled me. Someone doing historical research on Sarbanes-Oxley precedents couldn't draw a more damning parallel. 


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