It would overlook the nature of the National Socialist dictatorship to take Schmölders’s public utterances at face value and conclude that he was an illiberal advocate of central planning. On the contrary, he was critical of monopolistic and collectivistic tendencies and preferred a market-oriented economic system, as his 1942/43 memorandum for the Kreisauer Kreis on “The Economy and Economic Leadership in a European Bloc after the War” shows. Economic competition in a market economy, Schmölders argued, was ideally suited to increase efficiency and stimulate growth as the price mechanism awarded the best and punished the worst product better than any planning institution. While Schmölders considered it necessary to stimulate and enhance individual economic performance, he rejected plans, orders, and other external incentives. Rather, the innate desire to gain money and achieve social recognition should be set free. While competition was the fundamental principle to engender economic prosperity, Schmölders acknowledged that it could produce inefficiencies and injustice and, therefore, needed a strong state, setting a legal order to guarantee its functioning. In this respect, his vision of the future economic order was in line with fellow ordoliberals like Ludwig Erhard, Alexander Müller-Armack, and the Freiburg School, who later helped to create the “social market economy” in the Federal Republic.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 323