<blockquote>"There is a definite "leftist" ideology, inspired by excessive social rationalism, as opposed to a "rightist," conservative one, respecting certain things we cannot touch, weigh, or measure but which are of sovereign importance. The real
role of property cannot be understood unless we see it as one of the most important examples of something of much wider significance.
It illustrates the fact that the market economy is a form of economic order that is correlated to a concept of life and a socio-moral pattern which, for want of an appropriate English or French term, we may call "buergerliche" in the wide sense of this German word, which is largely free of the disparaging associations of the adjective "bourgeois."
This buergerliche foundation of the market economy must be frankly acknowledged. All the more so because a century of Marxist propaganda and intellectualist romanticism has been astonishingly and alarmingly successful in spreading a parody of this concept. In fact, the market economy can thrive only as part of and surrounded by a buergerliche social order.
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It is curious and saddening to see how blind the average type of socialist is vis-à-vis the economic, moral, and sociological functions of property, and even more that particular social philosophy in which property must be rooted. In this tendency to ignore the meaning of property, socialism has made enormous progress in our time. Traces of this may be discovered even in modern discussion on the problems of enterprise and management, which sometimes give the impression that the property owner is the "forgotten man" of our age.
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It is shocking to think how far our minds are already moving in terms of a proletarianized, mechanized, centralized mass society. It has become almost impossible for us to reason other than, in terms of income and expenditure, of input and output, having forgotten to think in terms of property. That is, by the way, the deepest reason for my own fundamental and insurmountable distrust in Keynesian and post-Keynesian economics.
It is, indeed, highly significant that Keynes attained fame mostly for his trite and cynical remark that "in the long run, we are all dead." And it is even more significant that so many contemporary economists have found this dictum particularly spiritual and progressive. But let us remember that it only echoes the slogan of the Ancien Regime in the eighteenth century: Apres nous le deluge. And let us ask why this is so significant. Because it reveals the decidedly unbuergerliche, the Bohemian spirit of this modern trend in economics and in economic policy. It betrays the new hardboiled happy-go-luckiness, the tendency to live from hand to mouth, and to make the style of the Bohemian the new watchword for a more enlightened generation.
To incur debts becomes a positive virtue; to save, a capital sin. To live beyond one's means, as individuals and as nations, is the logical consequence. But what else is this than Entbuergerlichung, deracination, proletarianization, nomadization? And is not this the very opposite of our concept of civilization which is derived from civis, the Buerger?
Muddling through from day to day and from one expedient to another, to boast that "money does not matter" — that is, indeed, the opposite of an honest, disciplined, and orderly concept and plan of life. The income of people living on these lines may have become buergerliche, but their style of life is still proletarian.
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Let us apply our reflections to another most important field: money. Let us recognize that respect for money as something intangible is, like property, an essential part of the social order and of the mentality which are the prerequisites of the market economy.
To illustrate my case, I want to tell two stories which I take from the financial history of France. At the end of 1870, Gambetta, the leader of the French Resistance after the defeat of the Second Empire, left the besieged capital in a balloon for Tours to create the new republican army. In his desperate need for money, he remembered that his admired predecessors of the Revolution had financed their wars by printing and assignats. He asked the representative of the Banque de France to print for him a few hundred million notes. But he met with a flat and indignant refusal. At that time, such a demand was considered so monstrous that Gambetta did not insist. The Jacobin firebrand and all-powerful dictator yielded to the determined No of the representative of the central bank who would not accept even a supreme national emergency as an excuse for the crime of inflation.
A few months later, the socialist revolt known as the Commune occurred in Paris. The gold reserves and the plates of the notes of the Banque de France were at the mercy of the revolutionaries. But, badly in need of money and politically unscrupulous as they were, they strongly resisted the temptation to lay their hands on them. In the very midst of the flames of civil war, the central bank and its money were sacrosanct to them.
The significance of these two stories will not escape anyone. It would, indeed, be harsh to ask what has become of this respect for money in our time, not least of all in France. To restore this respect and the corresponding discipline in money and credit policy is one of the most important conditions for the durable success of all our efforts to restore and maintain a free economy and, therewith, a free society."
- Wilhelm Röpke,
Free Economy and Social Order, January 11, 1954</blockquote>