Throughout the postwar period the German political parties concentrated on attacking the occupation powers for the severity of their controls. To libertarians in this country the German call for freedom sounded like a demand for a free market. This was not so. What most Germans meant by freedom was liberation from foreign occupation and, above all, freedom to impose their own controls. FULL ARTICLE BY HANS SENNHOLZ
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/10515/the-economic-comeback-of-germany/
The Economic Comeback of Germany
Previous post: The Fallacy of Intellectual Property
Next post: Blast from the past
{ 9 comments }
In recent polls the FDP (liberal Party of Germany,
liberal in the classical sense / libertarian) has reached 18%, unusually high for the FDP, a party that is often demonized as the party of the rich and big business in the main stream media.
Libertarian / free market ideas are totally alien to the MSM in Germany.
Deregulation and privatization – or Austrian Economics for that matter – are considered four letter words.
The only plausible explanation seems to be, that Ron Paul, the Mises Institute and libertarian blogs are having a real impact on Germany.
I recently had a conversation with two employees of our university restaurant and in retrospect i asked myself, where they might have gotten those ideas from
.
Greetings from Germany
Yours Simon
And why hasn’t Germany collapsed yet from all of these bad policies? Well, that’s what the EU is for.
I see the whole trend towards a larger and larger EU and tighter and tighter integration within the EU as being a sort of imperialist project undertaken by the member nations in order to disguise the problems inherent in their domestic socialist systems and delay their collapse. Continual expansion of the higher-order state provides the excuse for more debt, more inflation, more bureaucracy, more taxes.
One can see this clearly in almost any state as small municipal governments take over services and charities from private entities, they flop financially, then the metropolitan/county/provincial/state government takes over and eventually approaches ruin, then the national government spends itself nearly into bankruptcy, then international organizations such as the EU. UN, IMF, etc. are brought in a last-ditch attempt to prevent rentseekers and politicians from having to eat the bitter fruit they have grown in their jurisdictions.
When the world is almost completely divided up into empires of debt and coercion then the final gasp of the dead-enders is to attempt to crush the last few holdouts that are within their grasp. That is why the European and US governments are only now reaching out to grab the contents of a handful of Swiss bank accounts. They’ve already made a total hash of their own jurisdictions, of the Middle East, Africa and South America, and now they’re clutching at straws before they sink beneath the waves.
“There was nothing left to distribute, nothing to be rationed. The hundreds of thousands of officials who enforced the mass of economic laws — all enacted by the former Reichstag — were perplexed and helpless. Millions, of whom I was one, depended upon and actually lived by the “black market.”
That’s what happened to the USSR and China. The black market kept people from starvation. I would guess that’s what will happen to Europe and the US. The process will be slow, so slow that few people will be aware of it. But one generation in the future will wake up and realize there is nothing left of redistribute and they will grudgingly lift some of the restrictions on the market. Fortunately, there will always be a black market for those of us who aren’t slaves to the state.
I wonder if German contrariness isn’t once again causing an accidental policy shift towards the free market. Certainly Merkel took a lot of heat for her opposition to “quantitative easing”, but if one believes the official statistics, Germany has laid off the sauce and is already seeing positive GDP growth.
Good call, Timothy. The Germans also had that frightening experience of Mugabenomics during the Weimar.
Would someone mention when the article was written by Sennholz?
Joining Weingarten’s quest:
Would someone mention when the article was written by Sennholz?
As noted beneath the text:
« This article was originally published as “The Economic Comeback of Germany” in The Freeman, December 1955. »
“This article was originally published as “The Economic Comeback of Germany” in The Freeman, December 1955.”
Christopher, thank you for this information, as it clarifies much that was written in the article.
Comments on this entry are closed.