Amelie Lanier
May
2021

Welcome!

Enjoy yourself!

I’ve decided to publish my articles and travel reports on a homepage so you can read them.

For more than 15 years I’ve been investigating the economic history of Austria in the 19th century, focusing on the credit system, banks, the stock exchange and securities. ’Austrian history’ in this period of course covers the events in territories that now belong to other states, to the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Ukraine, and others. For this reason I needed to extend my research activities to some of the states now neighbouring Austria, most of all to Hungary.

Nobody in Austria today is interested in the investigation of the credit system’s history, although our archives are packed with files that offer all the insight you might want. There is no one who has really dealt with this theme during the last 50 or 60 years. Austrian historians’ attitude towards the history of Hungary is similar.
The people who make decisions about the allocation of funds, such as scholarships and grants, or the filling of university chairs evidently do not attach importance to a part of Austria’s history that is not one of it’s glorious chapters. Austria never was an economic superpower and the clumsy efforts of several of it’s statesmen as well as the poor intellectual foundation of some of Austria’s theorists of national economy often have a ridiculous streak, sometimes almost moving in their helplessness. In contrary to the widespread assumption that economic history is dry and boring I can assure you: as far as Austria is concerned, it can be quite entertaining!

I decided to focus on the history of money because I consider money to be a harmful thing – It determines the relationships of people in a detrimental way. Those who have too little of it – nowadays the overwhelming majority of the world’s population – are thereby restricted in meeting their wants and needs, and forced to submit themselves to the outrageous demands of their (ab)users. The latter, the ones who have too much of it, use it for giving others a hard time: either they employ people to work for them in order to get even richer, or they fire them, leaving them with nothing to live on.
(In most parts of the world there is no ’dole’, and even in European countries it is increasingly regarded as an unnecessary gift to the unemployed …)
The state reserves for itself the monopoly of the production of this primary good: it prints the banknotes, which are valid only by the power and sovereignty of the state. Those who also print money without the authority of a state are subject to legal persecution and sooner or later end up in prison.
The thing gets really exciting when states themselves forge the currency of other states, something that happens even today. It leads to severe diplomatic complications …

If someone is really in a bad shape nowadays, he or she may resort to all kinds of weird explanations: There is the unhappy childhood that determined you and made you become such a failure. Then there are the phases of the moon that are always getting in the way when you really want to get things moving. You have, of course, envious neighbours or a mean mother-in-law. Let’s not forget about the battle of the sexes: bad men suppressing poor women, or malicious women, giving men hell. You may have a bad Karma that you have to bear all your current life, as a hard trial for the next one. And so on. But the idea that something is wrong with our economical system is rather unpopular, even more the heretic thought that what might be to blame is the money we are running after day by day. It makes us follow a bunch of aims that are detrimental to our well-being.

This is why I have decided to investigate this universal theme as thoroughly as possible. In the end, one wants to know the enemy!I’m not a follower of any popular school of economics, nor of any less popular one.#

I’m not an adherent of the ideas of Proudhon, J.M. Keynes or Silvio Gesell. The only literature on economics I consider worth reading is Das Kapital. Still I have often been told – both by detractors as well as by supporters – that I am not a Marxist. If you have read my articles, you can decide for yourself. Only, of course, if this question matters to you at all ...

My interests, research activities and personal friendships have led me to travel to the socialist countries even before the fall of the Iron Curtain and this has furthermore inspired me to work on the economy of Real Socialism and its clash with the free market economy. On the breakdown of the socialist and the victory of the capitalist system I have written a few articles in the course of the last 15 years, but today all possibilities of publication in the German speaking press have ceased for me, for various reasons. Some periodicals simply ceased to exist. Others stopped communicating with me without giving any reasons. I can only assume that either I was too left wing, or too much of an economist, or too negative, or not enough feminist.
In other, non-German language organs I was slightly more successful, but as it is more trouble to write an article in a foreign language I haven’t been too active recently. But if you keep looking at my website it might be that I will publish something again.

Some of my publications were on Nietzsche, on whom I wrote my thesis.
And then I have a lot to tell about the countries I’ve been to, so have a look at those pages. This, at least, is in English, while most of my previously printed (or unpublished) articles are not.

If you have questions, suggestions or criticisms, write to me.

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