The SPD's main economic theorist Rudolph Hilferding argued that not only was the WTB plan un-Marxist, it "threatened the very foundations of our program." As Berman put it, the SPD, as good Marxists, still saw letting the business cycle run its course as the only possible policy. Like the Austrians that they opposed in every other way, the SPD thought that intervention would simply delay the inevitable and make matters even worse. This was hard-core austerity thinking, except it came from the heart of the putatively democratic left. As Union leader Fritz Naphtali, who sided against the WTB plan, argued, "The crisis, with all of its changes and shifts of purchasing power, is a means of correction which must necessarily be accepted."

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 531