Skip to content

Günter Reimann Quotes

1904–2005 Germany

Hans Steinicke (November 13, 1904 – February 5, 2005), better known by his pen-name Günter Reimann, was a German-born economist and writer. He was noted as founder and editor of International Reports, a New York-based weekly publication he created in 1947 and sold to the London Financial Times in 1983, and author of The Vampire Economy (1939) about what he described as the onerous business policy of the National Socialist German Workers Party and its disastrous effects on the German economy.

Germany
Economists
Non-fiction authors

Random Günter Reimann quote

9 quotes

The existence of a state within the State—the Party and the bureaucracy—is a phenomenon of the post-War world.

The old type of capitalist who adheres to the traditional concepts of property rights is doomed to failure under fascism.

In others cases, National Socialist officials were levying harsh fines of millions of marks for a “single bookkeeping error.”

The larger the big corporations grow and the closer they become connected with the State bureaucracy, the fewer changes there are for the rise of new competitors.

While State representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped, because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a ‘profiteer’ or ‘saboteur’ followed by a prison sentence.

You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain about it. The new State loans are nothing but confiscation of private property, because no one believes that the Government will ever make repayment, not even pay interest after the first few years.

[F]ascism is a new brand of feudalism in which the private capitalist has become merely a tool of the State—where absolute power has entirely taken the place of money power.

Whereas in democratic countries the businessman may use his money to influence legislation and public opinion and thus operated as a source of power and corruption, in fascist countries he can exist only as the subject upon whom State power operates. The corruption in fascist arises inevitably from the reversal of the role of the capitalist and the State as wielders of economic power.

A foreign visitor to the Berlin Stock Exchange would easily be deceived. There are announcements of daily quotations and price changes as though a free Stock Exchanged still existed, but nowhere would he find the former ‘public’— private buyers and sellers—as represented by independent brokers, bankers and ‘visitors.’

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Günter Reimann (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.