Today, I read in my local newspaper about a government warning - actually against itself, though hardly anyone reads it that way.The aged are increasingly threatened by poverty, the government tells us. Throughout the history of the Federal Republic of Germany (though, see my qualification at the end of the post), people were told the government would be the best guardian of their material retirement prospects - people were promised this government "goody", left with no choice but to buy into it legally, for it was made law, intellectually, for it was taught in school and at home, and materially, for they were forced to finance it.
The government has squandered people's money, handling it inefficiently and shamelessly allocating it toward "projects" (like subsidising consumption in East Germany) that the forced retirement savings were expressly not to be used for - one of those crimes easily committed and promptly decriminalised by a political system in which the rule of "law" boils down to giving arbitrary government decrees the formal characteristics of a law, rather than having them adhere to the substance of law. Like its predecessor regimes - the Kaiser's Empire, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich - the Federal Republic of Germany chose to replace the rule of law (Rechtsstaat) by the rule of legislation (Gesetzesstaat).
We have no Constitution to protect us against arbitrary self-aggrandising manoeuvres that the government sells as essential requirements of "social justice" and other socialist-paternalist figments held up by the mongrel substitute of a Constitution that the Germans base their social order on: das Grundgesetz. In the face of a constitutional document impotent to restrict power, the government essentially does as it sees fit - after all, it represents the rule of the people, does it not?
Having misappropriated and squandered our money, the government now admonishes us not to neglect our duty to ensure retirement income through private investment.
Poverty, the government is saying, is lurking because we are not saving enough of our money for retirement provisions.
In a way, the government is right. We should never have allowed it to take over the business of providing for old age.
Germans are a people of employees, reinforcing the economic illiteracy that our "economists" teach at university level and via the media ("vee must not haff kapitalism, vee need se government to ensure vatt it feels social dgustiss shoult mean"), while the non-self-employed majority of adult Germans are forced to give over a large part of their income to government, which mendaciously claims to use it for old-age provisions.
The truth of the matter is, the wealth of West Germany was built in the absence of a strong state, which had vanished with the nation's collapse that ended the Second World War.
Within 10 years, the West Germans, left to their own devices and allowed to pursue their purposes in a free market environment, had restored the country's fortunes to make it the third richest nation of the world.
This wealth helped to make the state powerful and meddlesome again.
In order to increase his chances of winning the next election, Chancellor Adenauer decided to make inordinate promises to the population concerning retirement entitlements - and went on to force the people to pay for his criminal audacity.
Beforehand, when Adenauer consulted the father of the German economic "miracle" - Ludwig Ehrhard - on his ingenious "social security" plans, the latter, did not take long to respond thus: If we do this, Mister Chancellor, we are going to be bankrupt in 40 year's time or so.
Never mind, Adenauer, an octogenarian at the time, was eager to end his life as the country's most powerful man. He was right, he would be long dead once "the s... hits the fan" (of unrestrained government).
It is tragic and telling that Germans refer to the emergence of their wealth as a "miracle" - something one does not understand. We are going to pay dearly for our ignorance of the indispensable role that liberty plays in making a people responsible, prosperous, peaceful and happy.
In the meantime, the corruption of government has assumed unspeakable proportions, and what scares me is that - even in a country that produced a Hitler, people are still fanatically convinced that a society based on liberty, and hence: free enterprise (the true source of unprecedented wealth for everyone), is bound to bring about what, in fact, only government is capable of: mass misery.
The government giveth, the government taketh - so be it, such are the laws of nature.
Hauptsache, wir werden regiert - most importantly: we must be governed.
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