The Party That Never Dissolved

r@raphaelbauer.com (Raphael Bauer) — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 09:30:00 +0200

On 8 December 1989 the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the party that had ruled East Germany for forty years, opened an extraordinary congress in an East Berlin sports hall. At the end of the debate a delegate from a farm-machinery combine in Erfurt stood up and moved that the party dissolve itself. He said he was acting on instructions from the members who had sent him, and he asked for a vote. When the vote came, not a hand went up for it. According to Günter Benser, a delegate who later wrote up the congress for the party’s own historical commission, both the jubilation and the relief were considerable¹.

Nothing Inherent in Goods

r@raphaelbauer.com (Raphael Bauer) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:30:00 +0200

Between the eighth and the seventeenth of March 1892 a commission sat in Vienna to decide what the money of Austria-Hungary should be made of. Its most eminent member was a fifty-two-year-old professor of political economy who had spent the previous decade in an academic war and the previous year preparing for this question. His evidence, Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1934, “attracted the widest attention” and “even achieved what, for an economist, was perhaps the unique distinction of causing a temporary slump on the stock exchange”¹. On 2 August the empire created the gold crown by law; the new currency came into force nine days later and lasted until the end of 1924².

History on The Prosperitist

The Party That Never Dissolved

Nothing Inherent in Goods