Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Social-Markets: The ruin of what was hoped to be the savior

It was meant to be the most "humane" form of capitalist markets, but it grew to be the most dangerous and life-threatening disease since the end of communist planned markets.
I hereby refer to the social-capitalism formerly introduced by Ludwig Erhard on the principles of free market with an eye on the unfortunate and poor people.

It should have worked like that. The state will not interfere within enterprises and de facto monopolies. The market is a seperate instance beside the state, supreme in itself. On the other side, all citizens should pay taxes equally to support the well-fare programs. Those programs were intended to provide for the old, the disabled and so on.

But as with all good intentions aside from reality, it went totally wrong. Now, Germany is sitting in a bowl of water and only the head is still on the surface of the water. We are on the eve of being drunk. The problem is not our attitude of lazyness or our hang to mindlessly follow government authority. This time, the enemy is the misunderstanding of the roots of capitalism and the greed of the German socialist party (SPD).
While Germany had its booming time during the 50s, there was no problem in redistributing wealth from the working force to the unemployed and into the insurance and health-care systems. But during the 70s and 80s, the boom was gone, but still the socialist government put more and more money into the well-fare system, extending it beyond the credibility of the tax-payers.
Although the administration wasn't purly socialst during the 80s, with the CDU taking control over the Administration again, the way they acted on the markets and on the tax-payers was strongly influenced by socialst manners.

The pay-off we see today, bankrupt insurance companies (AOK etc.), high deficite (EU deficite law suit against Germany), high rate in company crashes (around 30% of all start-ups in 2003) and high unemployment. The regional and local administrations are next to bankrupt and are continuously losing money to the federal system (best example, the city of Berlin).

Despite of all this, the government even has time to surpress/oppress and threaten the one field, which it has always supported with subsidies.
The farms and agricultural companies have always been kept alive and out of the competition of the markets by German and EU fundings. Instead of keeping their businesses competitive, the farmers had changed towards producing those goods that got the financial support by the government, regardless of the demand of the market and the environmental requirements such as the right soil/climate and so on.
This is how the European Union had produced this extreme output of milk, tomatoes and other agricultural products, which could be acquired cheaper and easily from aboard and oversee. However, all the products from oversee that had to run competition against German food had no chance, because in return for the subsidies, the farmers had to follow the prices the European Union/German government set.

Today, the german government thinks about reducing these subsidies, but are we prepared to do so?

The whole economic tree isn't competitive anymore, since they had lived in a controlled, planned environment so long. But there is hope on the horizon, since the Commitee of Young Farmers had announced that Germany indeed could operate agricultural companies that could be competitive to the international market.
However, this would result in a competition which would leave all those farmers behind who weren't prepared to work on their results.
In a country like Germany, where the sympathy always goes with the loser, despite of the circumstances or the man's behaviour, such a unfair competition is beyond sound reasoning.
It will cause an outrage, if the next government pursues this course. And the outrage will come from those who don't want to work, those who don't want to achieve, those who don't want to create, but to argue about everything.

So, let them call out, because we are prepared.

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