Hacker News Reader

Comment by MaxPock | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Germanys economic policies really have nothing to do with "liberal agenda".

I guess they're talking about neoliberal, which is completely different from liberal (but overlaps - both liberals and conservatives are neoliberal; actual leftists aren't)

The problem are leftist policies that have completely destroyed any economic dynamism and that have created such high tax burdens that working full-time and trying to advance in your career is basically not worth it for many professionals. I know a lot of people who have either left the country or who have switched to part-time, because doing four days a week gives you 50% more weekend, but only costs you a little bit of money if you are reasonably well paid.

If anything, we need more economically liberal policies, because those actually do stimulate innovation and growth. Instead, leftists are completely focused on how they can extract even more money from the productive part of the population to give to the unproductive.

To my knowledge, leftists aren't in power anywhere, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. And if they are in power somewhere, they're certainly not bailing out massive automotive companies.

That doesn't explain how Denmark and Sweden can have quite high economic dynamism while the tax burden is higher than Germany.

It's not that simple, it's never that simple...

> liberal agenda

It is quite the opposite of a liberal agenda. German policy is very illiberal in that it is heavy on bureaucracy, strict on regulations, and nowadays firmly stuck in a green-at-any-cost course. All that leads to high energy prices, sky-high barriers for industrial development and entrepreneurship and therefore high prices of german-produced goods.

Green at any cost? What do you mean here?

Did you look at the state of rail and water ways, did you see subsidies for agricultural diesel, do you know they’re still buying gas from Russia, gasoline is still heavily subsidised, etc…

They’re greener than the US, yes. But far from green at any cost. They built these huge mountain of papers that make everything difficult, not just building a wind turbine (~7 years, literally trucks of paper…).

But in terms of the classical liberal movement to control markets, the stuff before the neolibs.

Liberal would mean it's on the car producers to get out of this situation again, but instead the government tries to comfort that industry and financially support them. What about that is liberal? Or maybe you mean something else than what most of the world interprets this word as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

It's the American duopoly in these peoples head man. If you're a Republican everything bad is "Liberal" and if you're a Democrat everything bad is "Conservative". Always quite entertaining when it is used as a measuring stick for policies developed in a multi-party democracy which does not fall along the party lines as cleanly as it does in the US. The fact that Merkel voted against gay marriage always seems to break brains.

I didn't know it was in the liberal agenda to give automanufacturers protectionist mechanisms against competitors making products more aligned with customer demand to artificially prop up a major industry sector.

What kind of liberal are you talking about though? The American version or the European one? They mean very different things.

Morganthau is smilling from heaven or hell seeing the americans making his plan for Germany a reality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com