The electoral campaigns have started, which means the time for speeches has arrived. The President of the Federal Republic speaks in Berlin and is applauded for “giving a name to what is wrong”. He appeals to values, talks about social responsibility, judges, moralizes, suggests that everybody should accept responsibility, demands control and new rules. Also, he declares that he has found the bad boys – even if they are partly among his own ranks.
For me, this looks too simple. I do not think we should condemn bankers and speculators who, after all, only played the normal economics game. A short while ago, they were still highly respected persons and as such celebrated as idols.
The Federal Chancellor made a reservation to talk at Anne Will’s on Sunday evening. She keeps telling us that “Germany must be stronger than ever after the crisis”. That is her political goal. What exactly she means with “stronger” can only be speculated at.
If it means that after the crisis there will again be more oil burned per capita and more noise generated, more meat eaten and more kilograms of car carried around, more cigarettes smoked and more beer drunk, more speculation and more betting, then this is not my definition of “stronger”.
Wouldn’t it even be desirable to have negative conservative growth, because that would make our lives more worth living and get us nearer to our climate goals? If we burn less oil, we also generate less carbon dioxide.
And is there not qualified growth regardless of how much we consume? For example by again producing high-quality food, improving sensible infra structure (and I do not mean three-lane motorways), cultural and educational opportunities and individualized services. Have our lives not become poorer in the “consumer society”? Does it not give more personal happiness to live actively, instead of passively watching television? Such a growth in the quality of life would also have a positive effect on the total net value.
For me, “stronger” means that people re-discover elemental values and voluntarily change their behaviour. And that they remember where the real problems lie. I would wish for us to learn from the crisis how to accept the great challenges of a global world together. What we need is for every individual person to act, not make long speeches. That is something each of us has to do. I am getting the impression that more and more people actually start doing it!
Currently, our political activities are mainly defined by the accumulation of more and more debt. We do this in order to get the “financial industry” out of debt, although this “industry” has erred catastrophically and probably still does (I am afraid that now there is harder and more speculation than ever before). We take for granted that future generations will pay for it – or else we hope that inflation will come soon. Is the “financial industry” an industry at all? I often read that the de-industrialization as it happened during the last 20 years in the USA and Germany is one of the reasons for the current problem. But the “financial industry” has been developing beautifully over that last few years.
And then there is the often cited promise that we want to do everything in order to get through the crisis better than other countries. It might be more important to see to it that the poor countries lose less during the crisis than the rich countries. Otherwise all will drown at the end.
I miss all these issues in the Sunday Speeches.
RMD
Translated by EG
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