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30 years of German unity: For a capitalism with a heart
Photo: Soeren Stache / DPA
Let's put it this way: It wasn't really happy when Christian Lindner said last weekend that he often started the day together with his now-out General Secretary.
And that this is not meant in the way "you think".
Oops.
Big excitement.
Clear.
Sexist.
In any case.
What is wrong with today's waves of excitement is only the contrast to the relative lack of interest in what, shall we say, the new General Secretary of the FDP said at the same party congress about how he imagines the future.
That could determine what (s) a party will do that could rule again in a year (if it still manages to do so after such a speech), and what is potentially at least as important for the future of the country.
Thomas Fricke, arrow to the right
Born in 1965, has been running the WirtschaftsWunder internet portal since 2007.
From 2002 to 2012 he was chief economist of the "Financial Times Deutschland".
He is co-founder of the "Forum New Economy", in which experts have come together to create a new economic leitmotif.
What Secretary General Volker Wissing presented with a lot of verve over the weekend sounded a bit like common speeches from the international economic mainstream 30 years ago, when the Germans almost immediately celebrated unity - a kind of symbol for the triumphant advance of capitalism became: the end of the story, as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama diagnosed a little prematurely.
And the beginning of times when capitalism turned on the turbo after Reagan and Thatcher, with even more financial market reforms and deregulation.
And where somehow nothing was considered good what the state does - and everything that the market does.
Only that 30 years have passed since then - and this type of capitalism seems to have found itself in an ever deeper crisis since the great financial crisis at the latest.
Which can already be seen from the fact that more than half of the people in an international survey now expressed doubts that capitalism in its present form can solve the great problems of the world.
Or 80 percent of people in Germany say that privatizations are good now.
Efforted appeals to freedom do not improve this.
Which could explain why such an advocacy for everything that the market does today seems out of date.
Too big for business
It sounds at least a bit daring today to say things like that money from national budgets does not generate "percent growth and no innovation" - although there are now a number of studies on how in reality the state and companies have mostly worked together when it comes to them great innovations of history went on.
If only because such big twists and turns are too big to be overlooked by individual companies.
Which also takes the chatter about technology-open competition ad absurdum.
German carmakers and their rulers have celebrated this for years, with the result that due to the lack of direction in terms of infrastructure and electrical pillars, nothing has happened for years.
And the auto industry missed major trends.
Romanticizing old times doesn't help either.
Not everything was so free under Ludwig Erhard.
There were highly regulated financial markets.
And much less global competition.
And the wealth tax was even introduced.
Just as it doesn’t help to rewrite the history of other countries with convulsive clichés, because it seems to fit so nicely.
For example, with the Rumtata claim that France had made planification at the time - and therefore not an economic miracle.
A glance at current works is enough to see what nonsense that is: France's economy has grown just as spectacularly as the German one, except that the neighbors were not called the economic miracle, but "trente glorieueses" , the glorious 30 years.
Whatever that says now about Erhard and the planification.
Or doesn't say because there were other reasons for the post-war boom.
Of course, it is not a state of affairs when governments join, say, Lufthansa.
Or that so much nice money is taken out as debt, as Olaf Scholz is now doing.
And of course it is important to ensure that such special circumstances do not become permanent.
And of course it would be nice if taxes went down.
Or when resourceful researchers can determine how cars will drive in the future without any government intervention.
No sudden inclination towards communism
But governments and central bankers didn't do any of this because they suddenly lean towards communism - or want to disrupt free market forces.
When governments such as central bankers intervene in corona, financial and other major crises, they do so because the very market forces that are not working, according to which such crises should theoretically either not occur at all - or everything should regulate themselves.
It just doesn't do it.
Today there is more and more knowledge that a large part of the enormous challenges of our time are either a direct result of the drifting of capitalism that began 30 years ago - or that this kind of turbo-capitalism and those long-praised market forces will not be solvable.
If the biggest financial crisis in decades occurred in 2008, it wasn't because states intervened too much, but because financial market players got lost in an insane system of mutual indebtedness on largely free markets - and because too few state limits were set.
A crisis that continues to have an impact today, for example in the form of zero interest rates.
If rich and poor have drifted so drastically apart since the nineties, it is not because too much intervention has been made, but because market forces are contributing to the ever increasing concentration of wealth - whoever has a lot gets more of it all the easier.
Just as the free play of forces on the labor market can quickly lead to cheap wages being paid - and the income gap in Germany has grown steadily;
until the governments fortunately intervened and introduced a minimum wage.
If, in the past few years, where old industries fell apart in the globalization trend, people voted over-proportionally populists like Trump or the AfD or supporters of Brexit, that has nothing to do with too much state influence, on the contrary, with that much too for a long time the naive belief prevailed that such upheavals were regulated by themselves.
If schools are crumbling today, there is a lack of reasonable rail infrastructure or in rural areas the internet works according to the lottery principle - then this is not due to too much government, but rather to the fashion of past years to believe that private customers do judge.
And: If the traffic turnaround has not yet been achieved, it is not because someone from the state is slowing down resourceful companies - but because of the idea that such a historical reversal of an entire infrastructure would somehow arise in the pleasant competition of researchers.
In the end, governments have always had a say in that sort of thing.
Because that is usually beyond the horizon of individual entrepreneurs.
It is all the more absurd to hope that precisely those big problems of our time would be solved if the state stayed out of it.
It is illusory to still believe that the climate crisis can be remedied through the nice interplay of supply and demand.
Because the markets are overwhelmed with such long-term forecasts, CO2 prices have been far too low in the EU for years - and prices threaten to fluctuate far too much for it to really help to convert industries in a way that can be planned over the long term.
It is just as illusory to hope that the gap between rich and poor will level out by itself, when half of all wealth is inherited today.
In the coming years, smart ideas are needed for a new mix in which politicians help ensure that:
In the event of threatened economic upheavals in the regions concerned, new perspectives are created much earlier - and much more systematic care is taken to attract new companies that best suit the people and resources on site;
the drifting apart of wealth is stopped - and lower incomes tend to grow faster again than high ones;
much more money is invested in new, climate-friendly infrastructure, e-filling stations, rail expansion and other things;
and a much more dynamic understanding of what public institutions have to bring about when private ones don't do it, instead of just appearing as the epitome of bureaucracy.
All of this does not mean that 30 years after the triumph of capitalism, history is heading back towards communism, as friends of simple patterns immediately suspect.
Nonsense.
Of course, in spite of everything, capitalism is a lot better than anything communism that has been practiced so far.
And of course it is great what progress has already been made from private initiative.
But that doesn't mean that there aren't better variants of capitalism - in which market forces are less naive and everything that the state does is always bad.
On the contrary: There is a lot to suggest that all of this creates the prerequisites for allowing the economic miracle of personal freedom and open competition to work again in such a way that everyone benefits from it in the end.
Just like it used to be the case before the turbo was engaged.
Ur-capitalistic arrogance surges
Only when it is clear what the new world of transport should look like and there are enough government incentives for the new will it really be worthwhile for entrepreneurs to invest in the new - and people will start to say goodbye to the old car on their own and voluntarily .
Without a ban.
Only when we have fiber optics everywhere in the country will it be worth investing in more remote regions, which it has not done so far.
Only when the gap between rich and poor becomes flatter and the fear of social decline subsides will trust in the social market economy grow again - and populists will no longer have a chance.
Then the market economy can be fun again - much more.
Thirty years after unity and primordial arrogance surges, all that would be needed would be a new and purified market belief rather than the return of outdated slogans.
It is quite possible that they won't bring any more voters today anyway.
And it would be a shame for a party that fortunately relies on human freedom.
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