As one commentator has pointed out, Germany has a successful system of regulated capitalism while the US is suffering with its choice of laissez-faire capitalism. That goes a long way to explain why we're in the economic trouble we're in -- with enormous unemployment numbers -- and how the Germans have pulled out of the recession with flying colors.
Get this:
Statistics released Friday will buttress the German view that they had the formula right all along. The government on Friday announced economic growth of 2.2 percent compared with the previous quarter, the German economy’s best performance since reunification 20 years ago and an annual rate of close to 9 percent.
The strong growth figures will surely strengthen the conviction here that German workers and companies in recent years made the short-term sacrifices necessary for long-term success that its European partners did not.
Nor did we. Our businesses rolled along merrily in good times and then fired people. The Germans put their potentially unemployed workers on short work-weeks.
A vast expansion of a program paying to keep workers employed, rather than dealing with them once they lost their jobs, was the most direct step taken in the heat of the crisis. But the roots of Germany’s export-driven success reach back to the painful restructuring under the previous government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
By paring back unemployment benefits, easing rules for hiring and firing, and working together, management and labor, to keep a lid on wages, Germany ensured that it could again export its way to growth with competitive, nimble firms producing the cars and machine tools the world’s economies — emerging and developed alike — demanded.
Of course, the Germans didn't head into the recession with money owed to predatory lenders on their backs.
Germans steered clear of the debt-fueled consumption boom that many believe contributed to the financial crisis.
Germany isn't a socialist state. It has a smart, carefully regulated capitalist economy with a carefully worked out public-private health system, a balance between owners' and workers' interests reflected in corporate boards, and a people who were not victimized by out-of-control,predatory banks and lending institutions.
So I'm damned if I want to hear anymore lame neo-cons cant about socialism and stupid unemployed people who "don't really want to work" and who defend predatory American corporations and banks. With any luck, laissez-faire capitalism is experiencing the onset of its death throes and our grandchildren, if not our children, will live in a fair, self-respecting economic system.
