An Unfair Land?

Last night, ARD (German public TV, Channel One) ran two related shows.  At 8:15 PM....came a 45-minute documentary piece entitled 'Ungleichland' (An Unfair Land).

The hype of the piece is that Germany is having a problem in terms of fairness.  People can't find decent affordable housing.  They can't get ahead.  They are stressed out and blaming others for their woes.

It was a decent piece.....you can watch over at this site.  Note: all in German.

So that led onto 9 PM, and the Hart Aber Fair show (Hard But Fair). The topic here with the round-table?  Same thing....the unfairness. 

They brought on the SPD 'junior' wonder guy....Kevin Kuhnert.  His solution throughout the whole public forum....the government needs to take control and establish solutions (and more taxes on the wealthy).  At the end of the table was Christoph Groner.....self-made millionaire and a guy who plans out long-term investment strategies. 

At some point, Groner makes the dramatic point: "Politics is unable to use taxpayer's money wisely". 

I sat for several minutes going over that single phrase.  He's mostly correct.  You can look at various projects that the German national, regional and city governments have run, and find hundreds upon hundreds of screw-ups.  Probably over a quarter of their 'pocket-money' is wasted in some fashion.  If you returned the money to the public, in lesser taxation....they'd all have more money for innovation, renovation, and better lifestyles.

One of the SPD-often discussed themes is to go after family property of bigger values, in the form of inheritance taxes.  If you owned a hotel chain with a dozen structures, and passed on.....the kid inheriting it would have to sell a portion of it.....to pay for his chunk of taxes. As my German wife pointed out last night....the same property has been taxed year after year, via income and property taxes for decades, and this simply becomes a 3rd method of taxation....based on screwing people.

So I come back to this unfairness angle.  The general political solution is always a wealth redistribution deal.  You can only do this as long as capitalization is in full-swing, and a fair segment of society is trying extra hard to get ahead. If you ever reach a stage where there's no path laid out to get ahead, then everyone will settle on laying back and doing less.  Then this whole concept of redistribution will falter, and come crashing down.

My impression, at the end of two hours of this theme?  A working-class guy isn't buying much into the whole solution here being taxation and redistribution. The political idea that you can manage these companies into a fairness gimmick?  Well....companies who feel they've reached a stage where too much control exists....will take their product, their patents, and their knowledge to produce....to a country without the control structure.  They leave Germany.  Go ask the German government who produces TV's within the nation now....they simply grin and avoid answering that question.