Abs’s property-rights advocacy extended his wartime economic-constitution views rather than repenting them
Evidence
That an individual who had been an active participant in processing the expropriation of the property of German Jews would later be actively defending property was incongruous, but Abs did not act from amnesia or repentance. In his San Francisco speech he made a point of raising Cortney and Röpke’s bugbear issue of foreign holders of accounts of German banks who were “still waiting for a fair settlement.” Abs was the man who signed the document forgiving Germany’s massive war debt in 1953, and it is known that he did so in the belief that it was not forgiveness per se but instead a just settling of accounts for the German assets seized abroad. Abs’s campaign for investor protection was a continuation of the dogged commitment to the economic constitution dividing the public world of states from the private world of property. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 465
Categorization
- XREF: Ties to the book’s running theme of the ‘economic constitution’ separating public state power from private property.