The latest Cicero has an essay titled “Endet die Diktatur der kurzen Frist” (End the tyranny of the short term), where Michael Müller and Andreas Troge write what they call a “plea with six suggestions”:
The ideology of the pure economism is programming our life radically to the here and now. But extreme short term thinking prevents the necessary reflection and prudent decision making. Can the bond between time and money be broken?
The essay is charged with emotion, makes the required anti-capitalistic noises and takes the Ostrich View of implicit intellectual superiority of the European social model over mere “economism”. Short term thinking imported from the cowboy capitalism of the Anglo-Saxon world, argue the authors, is the reason why the social model has failed.
For some years now, a transformational process has been taking place. Its center has been the radical programming of life to an extreme short-term mentality. This template [of life] comes from the Anglo-Saxon economy and is highly resistent against social and ecological attempts at modernisation. Driven by the large finance corporations, the coupling of time and money becomes a tyranny of the short term. This regime rewards quick profits, short-term availability and immediate mobility. It contradicts the basic principles of the social market economy, which needs time because it builds upon the productive balance of interests.[Translations mine]
Predictably, their solution to the “problem” of economic short-sightedness is an increased role for the state in corporate governance and the environment coupled with that uniquely German social beast – forced consensus between “stakeholders”. This statist weasel-word, sounding like “shareholder”, serves the function of appeasing the casual free-marketeer while slyly serving the interests of incumbent business by raising barriers to disruptive non-”stakeholding” newcomers. Not quite incidentally, both authors hold high positions in the German environmental bureacracy – Müller is member of the Bundestag and parliamentary secretary in the environment ministry, while Troge is president of the federal environmental agency and professor of environmental economics.
It is bad enough that the authors think themselves enlightened enough to know better about financial matters than successful businessmen. The peak of ignorance is reached when they assign the trivial “economism” – “a mere exchange of goods” – to a rich concept like Hayek’s spontaneous extended order. If they had been even slightly less intellectually lazy they would not have attributed a “necessity of social considerations going beyond the individual” to Hayek, for the most rudimentary reading of Hayek would reveal that he calls the word “social” a poison mixed in our languuage and vows never to use that word.
It is a wonder to me how people who bemoan the short-term thinking in business are so eager to give up their liberties to posturing politicians, and seldom want to wait out the time it takes for markets to arrive at far deeper and more meaningful outcomes than these enlightened 68ers would ever manage to. Heck, the long term nature of the market even forgave them for their delusion in their youth, providing them with their cushy armchairs to pontificate out of. Good people of Germany, join me as I call for freedom from arrogant deluded hippies!
Filed under: Environment, Fatal Conceit, Hayek, Politicians | Leave a Comment
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