Politics & Power Quote by Hjalmar Schacht

Schacht’s sentence performs a classic technocrat’s sleight of hand: it dresses a political thesis as a neutral “fact,” then quietly smuggles in its real payload - legitimacy. By framing society as an arithmetic imbalance (“consumers” outnumber “producers”), he turns democracy itself into an economic pressure system: the many who buy and vote can lean on the fewer who make, invest, and organize production. The wording is clinical, but the implication is combustible. If consumers are structurally dominant, then mass politics will predictably demand low prices, higher wages, and protection from downturns - even when producers insist those demands endanger output. The phrase “not inconsiderable” is doing the work of understatement, a polite way to say: this pressure is decisive, and it can distort policy.

The subtext is defensive, even faintly admonitory. “Consumers” here aren’t just shoppers; they are the electorate, the street, the crowd. “Producers” aren’t merely factory owners; they are the managers of the economy’s productive capacity - the class Schacht, a central banker and later Nazi-era economic administrator, habitually treated as the rational stewards. Read in historical light, it echoes Weimar Germany’s fear that mass demands - for bread, jobs, stability - could push governments toward inflationary finance, price controls, or punitive politics against business and creditors.

What makes the line effective is its cool impersonality. It converts a fraught moral conflict (who should bear sacrifice?) into a demographic inevitability. Once politics is reduced to headcount, the reader is nudged toward an elite conclusion: protecting “production” may require insulating economic management from popular pressure. That’s not just economics; it’s a theory of power.