Mrs T,

thank you for that “A shorter Christiansen”! It’s strange to understand how the ARD can justify funding it through its “entertainment” budget, as they happen to do.

Actually, for me, competition is one major advantage of the EU enlargement. Did you read this week’s Economist’s special on “reforming Germany”?

Did you read this week’s Economist’s special on “reforming Germany”?

Read it? Ah, sure, Tobias, no doubt I was channelling it. Like every good liberal, I imbibe whatever the Economist serves up and internalise it as though it were the Word of God Himself.

And, oh yeah: it’s okay to fund Christiansen through the entertainment budget because it’s very entertaining.

My favourite moment: Mutter Beimer shares with the nation her insights on the thorny abortion issue; insights she gained when one of her fellow-characters on Lindenstrasse was thinking about having an abortion. Bishop Dyba (the Lord have mercy on his soul) was also a guest that night, but I thought that, since Sabine was interviewing a fictional TV mother, she might have done better to replace Dyba with a fictional TV clergyman - say, Onkel Ludwig Drombusch or der Fahnder - for the spiritual side of the question.

Thought some of you out there
might find some interest in this little
gem of Eurodemocracy…..

This Wednesday the Irish Presidency of the EU went for a bypass of
the democratic process in the EU Parliament and managed to “secure
a qualified majority for a counter-proposal to the software patents
directive, with only a few countries - including Belgium and Germany -
showing resistance. This proposal discards all limiting amendments from
the European Parliament and reinstates the laxist provisions from the
Commission, adding direct patentability of data structures and process
descriptions as icing on the cake.”

For more details, see http://swpat.ffii.org/news/04/cons0507/

The Irish Presidency of the EU proudly announces it is sponsored by
Microsoft and Dell: http://www.eu2004.ie/sitetools/sponsorship.asp

Oh come now, Mrs. T, you’ve taken a sarcastic stance towards the CDU, the SPD, the Greens and The Economist, why on earth would I give you a drumbing for that? Really, applause would be a better response. Especially since you’ve pointed to the real flaw in the entire international competiveness argument: competitive labour costs means either raising productivity per unit labour costs or making everyone poorer, and unsurprisingly most folks prefer option 1. Furthermore, protectionism in a rich country generally doesn’t impress me. If moving your operations saves money than surely it should raise national income enough to pay off the people put out of work.

National competitiveness, however, doesn’t do much for me. This is something the States went though in the 80’s during the peak years of deindustrialisation, and the US undertook hazy “reforms”, especially in the labour market, and did get a race to the bottom, one which it keeps losing, since it turns out that Amercans resist the Malthusian bottom edge of the international labour market.

Indeed, I have neither an in principle objection nor a pragmatic problem with industries moving east. The easterners clearly need the jobs and, as Joan Robinson put it, the only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited at all. What I question is whether industry is really as mobile as people claim it to be, whether other causes for poor German growth aren’t just as great, whether poor German growth is really as big a problem as it appears to be and whether nebulous reforms that appear to mean shifting the tax burden to lower income households while gutting pensions is really a solution.

I might ask, for example, if GDP per capita growth statistics for Germany were used in lieu of GDP growth, if the German economy would appear quite so poorly off. Furthermore, I have to ask whether rapid unification isn’t just as much the cause of Germany’s difficulties, since the western part of Germany is performing a good deal better than the east. Alternatives to the way unification was originally handled might have essentially eliminiated this question as a poltical problem, since if the problem was west German indstries moving to east Germany, I doubt people would be able to make quite as much fuss. One might also wonder if the continuing revolution in manufacturing productivity isn’t a bigger cause of German unemployment than issues of competitiveness. Since unemployment - or at least underemployment - is a major problem in every industrialised nation in the world, I’m inclined to cut Germany a bit of slack. Or one might consider the effect of ECB interest rate policies. It seems to me that a large currency zone might well be better served by erring on the side of higher inflation rather than lower, since the costs created by moderate inflation are quite small, while the cost of a capital shortage can be enormous.

But yes, while I can see an argument for claiming either that there is no problem, or that the problem should be addressed by more classical means - immigration, monetary policy, treating the east different for the simple reason that it is different - I agree with you entirely that carping on ARD about the effects of free trade with Poland are not a sign of creative, capable leadership on the left or the right. Before leaving the States, I got sick of people whose response to every problem was to lower taxes and deregulate even when those solutions were demonstrably non-helpful and in some cases had created the problem in the first place. I don’t respond any better to claims in German that international trade is the cause of every problem.

Frankly, I’d back a significant liberalisation in the service industries - more flexible work hours and payroll taxes figured in proportion to wages instead of as fixed costs per worker. I would think this could be done without having to eliminate union involvement, so long as the state undertook to fund the gaps in social protections likely to come from it. It seems stupid to me that nothing in Belgium is ever open when I actually have time to shop, and it seems inane to me that this should happen at the same time as high unemployment. My only real difference with the liberal agenda is that I see no good reason to make people suffer in the name of competitiveness. If the changing the system can’t improve people’s lives, it shouldn’t be done.

Yes. I’m always amused by the man in the BMW/on the Airbus 340-500 talking on his Siemens phone about the eurosclerotic inefficiency of German industry…there’s a real danger that fashionable solutions will lead to throwing out the baby with the bath water.

I really love that term “wage dumping” and its sister “social dumping” (Sozialdumping) that I have been hearing over and over again in Austria for many years. It is such a stupid concept that one can only wonder why all of the local press keeps swallowing it as if it was honey.

If Eastern European countries like Slovakia can balance their budgets with lower taxes on lower revenues, what on earth is morally reproachable about that? If the electorate in those countries doesn’t like the approach, they could after all change their system for a German or Austrian welfare state - ah no, that still wouldn’t remove the “wage dumping” bit. And now, the latest great idea of the Austrian xenophobic right, which includes the social-democratic unions: “they use the money from the EU to pay for this!”

When will people finally accept that yes, there are poorer countries with hard-working populations, and it doesn’t mean the end of the world. After all, the capital is still mostly in the hands of the rich country companies. The Austrian national oil firm OMV has over the last decade bought up many oil networks in the east, is currently bidding for the national oil company of much larger Romania, and has seen soaring profits to the benefit of its Austrian shareholders and employees.