Although written in the early 1930s, the storyline of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World fits the modern-day world in many ways”, said Mark Skousen, the economist and initiator of FreedomFest. “There is constantly pressure to conform, to achieve stability and security at the expense of freedom and independence. Everyone must be happy or else! In the novel, the people of the world have become fully indoctrinated from birth, regimented and sedated with the drug soma. Those who oppose this ‘Brave New World’ are shipped off to Iceland or another far away outpost.”

According to Huxley, these outposts are “where you meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people, who for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Everyone, in a word, who’s anyone.”

Where is this bastion of intellectuals and free thinkers today? “At FreedomFest!,” declared Skousen.

The central theme of the world’s largest libertarian event, which brought together over 2,000 participants, was the erosion of economic and intellectual freedoms. At 120 degrees Fahrenheit, the outside temperature was unbearable even for a heat lover like me, prompting one speaker to remind us what we would be without air conditioning – the event couldn’t have taken place at all.

There were many distinguished speakers, including Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine, and Harvard scientist Steven Pinker, who spoke on “Human Rationality and Academic Freedom.” Academic freedom is under threat due to massive politicisation, said Pinker, even more so than in the McCarthy era. The following attacks on academic freedom were registered between 2014 and 2022:

• 877 attempts to punish scholars for constitutionally protected speech

• 114 incidents of censorship

• 156 firings (44 of them tenured professors)

The number of unreported cases is likely significantly higher. The politicisation of science has resulted in a notable shift towards the left, as demonstrated by Pinker through the example of his own university. The political orientation of the Harvard Faculty 2022: 

• 37.43 percent identified as “very liberal” (where “liberal” is synonymous with left-wing in the United States)

• 45.03 percent identified as “liberal”

• 16.08 percent identified as “moderate”

• 1.46 percent identified as “conservative” or “very conservative”

Pinker reminded us of the foundations of academic freedom, namely the principles: “No one is infallible or omniscient. Intellectual progress is driven by conjecture and refutation: Some people propose ideas, others probe whether they are sound: In the long run, the better ideas prevail.”

Any institution that disables this cycle is doomed to error, explained Pinker. Moreover, this undermines public trust in science: “Why should I trust the consensus, when it comes from a clique that allows no dissent?”.

Justin Amash then made the point that fundamental rules necessary for the proper functioning of institutions are being increasingly violated in the United States. Amash served as the US representative for Michigan’s 3rd congressional district from 2011 to 2021, left the GOP and became an independent on July 4, 2019. In April 2020, he joined the Libertarian Party, leaving Congress in January 2021 as the only Libertarian to serve in Congress. He garnered national attention when he became the first Republican congressman to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump, a position he maintained after leaving the party.

Amash criticised the lack of respect for Congress: “We sometimes received bills with up to 5,000 pages and were supposed to read them in one day. I refused to vote on any bill if I couldn’t read it before the vote. In extreme cases, we were only given a few hours.” Voters, Amash stressed, should not only consider a candidate’s policies, they should also weigh up whether they are committed to upholding the fundamental processes outlined in the constitution. 

It is not only academic and political freedom, but above all economic freedom in the United States that is under threat from ever-greater state interference in the economy, rampant bureaucracy, and an almost insane orgy of debt. Steve Forbes spoke of “modern socialism,” which differs from classic socialism in that companies are no longer formally nationalised, but the state increasingly determines what is produced, leading to a hollowing out of private property rights.

Whole Foods founder, John Mackey, presented his new book The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism. “It is all fun and games until bureaucrats get involved,” is how he characterizes his entrepreneurial experiences. 

Representatives of minor parties and independent candidates were also given the opportunity to speak at FreedomFest, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Green Party representative Jill Stein, Chase Oliver from the Libertarian Party and Randall Terry from the religious Constitution party. Their presidential debates were far less heated than the Biden-Trump showdown that could be seen on television at the end of June. I would not vote for any of these small parties or candidates, however, if only because of their pacifism and isolationism. Pacifism is very prevalent among libertarians in the United States, and accordingly, many representatives refused to support Ukraine. “How can you be pro-freedom and not support Ukraine in its fight for freedom against Russian imperialism?” I asked Steve Forbes, who said he felt the same way I did. But at FreedomFest, it was apparent that speakers promoting pacifist beliefs received a lot of applause. 

Mark Skousen has successfully curated an event where you can meet many great and interesting people, such as George Gilder, Grover Norquist (Americans for Tax Reform), Nick Gillespie (Reason), John Fund (National Review), Michael Shellenberger, Gale Pooley (Cato Institute), Marian Tupy, as well as libertarian activists Ken and Li Schoolland, and many more besides. This was my third time at FreedomFest and I will definitely be back next time.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life

Zhang shares a story about a former student who was offered a lucrative position with an international corporation when he graduated. The student was thinking about starting his own business and sought Zhang’s advice. The economist asked him what his parents thought of the idea. They were totally against it, the student replied. Zhang encouraged the student to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams. “In my view, decisions that parents agree with are likely not entrepreneurial decisions.” The student followed Zhang’s advice and is now a successful entrepreneur.

I have read many books about entrepreneurship, but Zhang’s book which has just been published by Cambridge University Press, is the best yet. Zhang teaches at Peking University and is the most prominent advocate of the market economy in China. He has been studying entrepreneurship for 40 years. He rightly says that the entrepreneur should be at the centre of economics – yet in many economics textbooks, entrepreneurs are hardly even mentioned. But, as Zhang explains, if you don’t understand entrepreneurship, you can’t possibly hope to understand the market economy.

Many economists see entrepreneurs almost as calculating machines, as individuals who rationally weigh up how to best utilise limited resources. However, this perception more accurately characterises a manager. Entrepreneurs, in contrast, are more like creative artists. They typically make decisions based on their gut feeling or intuition. However, gut feeling is by no means irrational or even mystical. In learning theory, gut feeling is referred to as “implicit knowledge,” which is the result of “implicit learning.” Implicit knowledge is acquired through practical experience, through “learning by doing.” 

The Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, famously said: “It is not necessary to study an MBA. Most MBA graduates are not useful… Unless they come back from their MBA studies and forget what they’ve learned at school, then they will be useful. Because schools teach knowledge while starting businesses requires wisdom. Wisdom is acquired through experience. Knowledge can be acquired through hard work.”

Intellectuals believe that academic knowledge, i.e. what you learn at university or from books, is all that really counts. However, if success in business was solely dependent on academic knowledge, then professors of business administration would be the wealthiest and most successful entrepreneurs. I have met hundreds of entrepreneurs in my life, including some who established gigantic companies and earned billions, despite never having studied at university. They all told me that they make the most critical decisions with their gut. This was also the result of my doctoral thesis on the psychology of the superrich, which Zhang also refers to frequently. 

Above all, entrepreneurs are opportunity seekers and opportunity finders. They discover opportunities that go unnoticed by others. Entrepreneurs are often non-conformists who swim against the tide and they are misunderstood by everyone. According to Zhang, the average person does not understand what an entrepreneur actually does and how they make money. 

Intellectuals, who consider themselves intellectually superior to entrepreneurs because they have read more books, are even worse. Many people consider intellectuals to be particularly clever people, but Zhang challenges this notion with a quote from George Orwell: “Some ideas are so foolish only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be so foolish.” The greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century were fueled by ideas supported by large numbers of intellectuals. Many intellectuals even professed admiration for dictators such as Mao and Stalin.

And so, it is no coincidence that the most radical socialist experiment in history, the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, was conceived in Parisian universities, where its leaders were studying for their doctorates in Marxist subjects. They believed that a perfect economic and social system could be designed on a drawing board. As a result of this experiment, between a fifth and a quarter of Cambodia’s population perished from mid-1975 to early 1979 – estimates range from 1.6 to 2.2 million people.

According to Zhang, however, anti-capitalism is not as widespread among Chinese intellectuals as it is in the West. “Perhaps it is because the Chinese intellectuals have lived under the planned economy for more than two decades. Their memories of hunger and want under the planned economy are still fresh, whereas Western intellectuals have never experienced life under the socialist planned economy.”

Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist. His books include The Power of Capitalism and How Nations Escape Poverty.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

True, Musk hasn’t been to Mars yet. But he has built the most successful private space company with rockets that are far superior and much cheaper than anything ever built by government space agencies. 

Elon Musk met the renowned aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, at a dinner in 2001. Five years earlier, Zubrin had gained widespread recognition for his groundbreaking book The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet And Why We Must. Inspired by Zubrin’s vision and passion for Mars exploration, Musk founded SpaceX just six months after their meeting, with the primary objective of taking humans to the Red Planet.

There had been a long period of stagnation in state-funded manned space travel after the moon landing and the cost of a space launch had remained static for 40 years. But thanks to the introduction of mostly reusable launch vehicles, Elon Musk’s company SpaceX has managed to cut launch costs by a factor of five over the past decade. The conquest of Mars has become more realistic.

Nearly thirty years after the release of his first Mars book, Robert Zubrin has recently published a new book (The New World on Mars: What We Can Create On the Red Planet), which excels in presenting the economic basis for the colonisation of Mars. Zubrin’s medium-term objective is to establish a settlement of 50,000 individuals on Mars. This goal, while ambitious, pales in comparison to Elon Musk’s grand vision, which envisions sending 1,000 starships, each carrying 100 passengers, to Mars every year for ten years to establish a thriving community of one million people on the red planet.

Thanks to the evaluation of numerous unmanned Mars missions, we now know that Mars is endowed with all the resources needed to support not only life but also the development of a technological civilisation. There is plenty of water on the planet, albeit in frozen form. Mars also holds vast quantities of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, all in forms readily accessible to those clever enough to use them. But how could a mission to conquer Mars be financed?

According to Zubrin, the initial stages of colonisation would likely be funded by the government, but the involvement of private investors would then be essential moving forward. The harsh conditions and limited workforce on Mars, he explains, would require the settlers to be highly innovative, developing new inventions and patents to establish a sustainable economy. This would, Zubrin writes, require advancements in technologies such as genetic engineering at a much faster pace than on Earth to guarantee a stable food supply. “The best, early, large-scale source of cash income that Mars colonists can generate will come from the sale and licensing of intellectual property.” Later, he continues, they would open up additional revenue streams, such as real estate, tourism, luxury goods, spectator sports, material exports, and asteroid mining, which, from a logistical point of view, is about 100 times easier to support from Mars than from Earth.

Zubrin is convinced that both the conquest of Mars and its subsequent colonisation can only be financed under capitalism. “Liberty will be necessary for us to settle space. We will need to create ever cheaper and more cost-effective launch systems, spacecraft, and space transportation systems, and these require liberty.” However, economic freedom is not only important for sending rockets to Mars, but even more important for its colonisation, Zubrin argues, because only maximum economic freedom can foster conditions to promote inventiveness and entrepreneurship, and only this will create the necessary foundations for the economic sustainability of a society on Mars. 

Zubrin is optimistic that Mars, much like America in the past, will appeal to freedom-loving, energetic people. After all, without the promise of freedom, the society that emerges on Mars would never be able to attract enough people willing to take the risks and endure the hardships required to make the project a success. 

Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist. His books include The Power of Capitalism and How Nations Escape Poverty.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life 

Today, many people rub their eyes in disbelief when they realise that the strongest vehement support for Islamist-inspired antisemitism comes from “postcolonial”, left-wing anti-capitalists at European and American universities. What many people don’t know is that anti-capitalism – whether left- or right-wing – and hostility toward Jews have always been closely linked. Of course, there are antisemites whose hatred of the Jewish community is not anti-capitalist in nature (but rather religious, for example), and many anti-capitalists are not antisemitic. But it is equally clear that antisemitism and anti-capitalism often go together.

Karl Marx – although he was himself Jewish – wrote to a friend that the Jewish religion was “repugnant” to him. The reason was that Marx accused the Jews of having made money their true god, as he wrote in an essay On the Jewish Question: “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” 

These statements from Marx are by no means isolated lapses; there are plenty of other similar examples: when he wanted to insult someone, such as the founder of German social democracy Ferdinand Lassalle, whose popularity he envied, he called him a “Jewish n*gger”; and from one of his holidays, Marx complained to his friend Friedrich Engels that the resort contained “many Jews and fleas.”

Antisemitism has existed for a very long time, but the emphasis shifted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Religiously motivated antisemitism faded into the background, while the image of the “rich Jew”, the “money-loving Jew,” became more and more prevalent.

The founder of the French Antisemitic League (Ligue antisémitique), Édouard Drumont, wrote in 1890: “The Semite is mercantile, covetous, scheming, subtle and cunning … The Semite is earthbound, with scarcely any concern for the life hereafter … The Semite is a businessman by instinct; he’s a born trader, dealing in everything imaginable, seizing every opportunity to get the better of the next man.” Drumont was one of the founding fathers of modern antisemitism, as was the socialist Eugen Dühring, who fought for a “socialism of the Aryan people.” 

Adolf Hitler’s antisemitism also had a strong anti-capitalist component. This aspect is particularly evident in his early speeches, such as one given on 13 August 1920, on the question “Why are we antisemites?” Here, he attacked “(international) stock market and loan capital”, which was financed by the Jews. 

National Socialists and other antisemites did not see Jews as a weak group, on the contrary, they were regarded as a particularly powerful group – as shown by the (forged) document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is cited by antisemites as evidence that the Jews strive for world domination. According to the Protocols: “All the wheels of government mechanism move by the action of the motor which is in our hands, and that motor is – gold. The science of political economy, invented by our wise men, has long ago demonstrated the royal prestige of capital.” Anti-Jewish movies such as The Rothschilds, which was filmed during the Third Reich, interwove hatred of the rich, capitalism, and Jews.

Stalin also became more and more of a radical antisemite which, incidentally, earned him Hitler’s admiration. Shortly before Stalin’s death in 1953, a major campaign against an alleged “Plot of the Jewish Doctor-Wreckers” began. Stalin claimed that a cabal of Jewish doctors were receiving orders directly from Jewish organisations in the United States and demanded that they be “thrown into chains, beaten to a pulp, and ground into powder”. All over the Soviet Union, Jews were harassed, beaten, and removed from public office and universities. 

Antisemitic stereotypes are based on conspiracy theories. It is the rich and super-rich – people like the Rothschilds or the investor George Soros – who, according to conspiracy theorists, are behind all the mischief in the world. Anti-capitalism and conspiracy theories are closely linked, as a survey I commissioned Ipsos MORI to conduct in 35 countries shows. 

The roots of anti-capitalism and antisemitism are frequently to be found in envy of the rich and successful. Historically, hatred of the Jewish community has a variety of sources. But the most powerful of these sources today, alongside Islamism, is anti-capitalism. It is therefore not surprising that anti-capitalism and antisemitism are gaining ground in Europe and the United States. They are twin brothers.

Rainer Zitelmann is author of books including How Nations Escape Poverty, The Power of Capitalism, and Hitler’s National Socialism.

Anticapitalists repeatedly claim that the rich have a decisive influence on politics and the outcome of elections, primarily through donations. This theory has always been wrong and the amount of donations will in all likelihood not be decisive for the election in 2024 either.

If money alone bought political power, Donald Trump would never have become the Republican candidate for the US presidency in 2016. That honour would more likely have gone to Jeb Bush, who was able to raise far more in political donations. Even Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, political scientists and two of the most prominent proponents of the thesis that US politics is determined by the rich, concede that “most of the big-money contributors – and most Republican think-tankers and officeholders – supported other candidates.” And “Trump’s positions went directly contrary to the views of wealthy donors and wealthy Americans generally.” 

Furthermore, if money determined political outcomes, Trump would not have won the 2016 election. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would have, as Page and Gilens themselves recognise: “The better-funded candidate sometimes loses, as Hillary Clinton herself did.” Clinton and her allies, including her joint committees with the Democratic Party and the super PACs that supported her, raised more than $1.2 billion for the full cycle, according to the Federal Election Commission. Trump and his allies collected about $600 million. Moreover, not one CEO in the Fortune 100 donated to Trump’s election campaign by September 2016. His victory did not stem from influence of the wealthy but more from grassroots opposition to wealthy coastal elites. 

If money alone could buy political power, then Joe Biden would also not have become president. Perhaps the White House would have gone to the wealthy entrepreneur Michael Bloomberg, who at the time of his application for the Democratic candidacy was the eighth richest man in the world, worth $61.9 billion according to Forbes. 

In all likelihood, Bloomberg spent more of his own money (and spent it quicker) on his election campaign than any other candidate in history, namely $1 billion in just over three months. This was revealed in the Federal Election Commission (FEC) report on campaign financing. Bloomberg financed his campaign himself and did not accept any donations. 

Bloomberg is by no means the only candidate whose wealth did not help him realize his political ambitions. In 2020, billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer put up $200 million of his own fortune and ended up without a single delegate. In the 2008 GOP primaries, Mitt Romney spent more than twice as much as John McCain – much of which was his own money – but he dropped out of the race in February and McCain went on to secure the Republican nomination. 

The Koch brothers have always been portrayed by critics of capitalism as among the most dangerous pro-capitalists on the planet, but David Koch learned just how hard it is to turn money into political power back in 1980, when he was one of the main supporters of the Libertarian Party and threw his hat into the ring as a candidate for vice president: he earned just one percent of the vote.

In an op-ed in The New York Times in 2016, Bradley A. Smith, the former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, concluded that “The Power of Political Money is Overrated”: “But while money is critical to inform the public and give all views a hearing, this election proves once again that money can’t make voters like the views they hear. Jeb Bush is not the only lavishly funded candidate to drop out of the race … The evil of ‘money in politics’ is vastly overstated.”

In his book Unequal Democracy, Larry M. Bartels criticizes inequality and the influence of the wealthy in the United States. He examined the “estimated effect of unequal campaign spending” in 16 US presidential elections from 1952 to 2012, concluding that “Republican candidates outspent their Democratic opponents in 13 of those elections.” But in only two elections, namely that of Richard Nixon in 1968 and that of George W. Bush in 2000 does Bartels conclude that “Republican candidates won close elections that they very likely would have lost had they been unable to outspend their Democratic opponents.” 

Rainer Zitelmann is the author of the book In Defence of Capitalism which contains a chapter about this topic.

The primary goal of many advertisers, as Ogilvy criticised in his classic Confessions of an Advertising Man, was to win awards for their creativity. They didn’t care one bit whether their spots increased sales, provided they were entertaining and won awards. These creative entertainers had done immeasurable damage to the advertising industry, he lamented in speeches and interviews.

Eventually, Ogilvy banned his employees from entering award contests, which sparked a small mutiny within his company. Ogilvy countered by establishing his own award – for results. The David Ogilvy Award was given to the campaign that demonstrably did the most to boost a client’s sales or reputation. Ultimately, however, he was unable to maintain the ban on taking part in award contests. Nevertheless, he did maintain his opinion that most campaigns that delivered real sales increases never won an award.

Many “creatives” feel called to greater things. Some even see themselves as unrecognised artistic geniuses. After all, Andy Warhol also started out in advertising.

Today, we have gone one step further. Advertising to increase sales and profits in an age when profit is considered immoral is a goal advertising people widely reject. Apparently, advertising is no longer about promoting a product’s benefits in an attempt to increase sales. Entertainment is also not enough. No, advertising must proclaim political messages and re-educate people.

A few years ago, Gillette prompted a backlash with its campaign against “toxic masculinity.” It is because of the traditional toxic image of masculinity, Gillette claimed, that children bully each other, men sexually harass women, and male employees do not let their female colleagues have a say. While the ads generated a lot of attention, they certainly didn’t help sell more products.

Mars announced that its M&M anthropomorphic candies would be moving away from only one “body size” to create more respect for the real-world diversity of body shapes. In addition, less emphasis is being placed on the gender of the candies and more is being done to highlight their nuanced personalities. For example, one of the female M&Ms is now dressed in sneakers instead of high heels to reflect her confidence and empowerment as a strong female, so says the company.

The Calvin Klein brand, which previously ran adverts featuring attractive women and men with great figures, also joined the progressive trend and instead ran a campaign with an overweight man and an overweight woman. Responses to the photoshoot were predominantly negative. A tweet reading: “Calvin Klein wants to go bankrupt” went viral and was viewed seven million times. The ad featured a trans man living in the Netherlands alongside the plus-size model. Both are wearing the brand’s sports bras. The campaign sparked predominantly negative comments: “Which women should this appeal to?” was asked thousands of times on social media.

The American beer brand Bud Light also caused its own advertising disaster when it launched a politically correct advertising campaign with the trans star Dylan Mulvaney. Sales and the company’s share price plummeted. The company achieved its goal of generating a lot of attention, but attention in itself is of no value if you alienate the actual target group that your product is intended to appeal to.

It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly when all this started, but Benetton’s famous advertising definitely marked a turning point. The Italian fashion brand shocked consumers in the late 1980s with large billboards depicting child labour, a blood-soaked T-shirt from a war zone, and an electric chair. Each image appeared with the Italian clothing manufacturer’s logo. The advertising industry still celebrates this campaign and its creator, Oliviero Toscani. For the company, this campaign represented a financial fiasco from which it has not fully recovered to this day.

Advertising people do not measure the “success” of their campaigns on any increase in sales they might achieve, but rather on the approval of the politically conformist left-wing advertising industry. No industry is as uniform in thought as the creative industry, warns the well-known German brand expert Oliver Errichiello.

The only absurd thing is that the CEOs of large companies allow these so-called creatives to convince them that this is what advertising should look like today. No one says: “The emperor has no clothes.” Some opportunistically follow every fashion, others are afraid of a “shitstorm” and being targeted by left-wing “activists.” But such campaigns actually do much less damage to a company’s sales than a failed marketing strategy that forgets that the whole point is to sell a product.

Even the biggest scandals and media witch-hunts cannot harm a company if the product is good. Behind Toyota, VW is the world’s leading automobile brand. After the VW “Dieselgate” scandal of 2015, when the German car manufacturer used special software to cheat on emissions tests and deceive consumers, universal prophecies of doom claimed the company had destroyed its brand and was facing a “fight for survival.” But consumers don’t evaluate brands or products according to the same yardsticks as woke marketing strategists. 

Today, VW is the most trusted car brand in Germany. In 2016, the year after the emissions scandal, VW sold more cars than at any point in its existence. I predict that if VW ever destroys itself, it will probably be because it opportunistically conforms to the dominant environmentalist spirit of the times and offers no resistance to the EU’s ban on combustion engines from 2035.

Consumers’ decisions are based on completely different criteria than advertising people think. If you watch commercials that constantly mention “sustainable,” “save the planet,” or even “diverse” and “vegan,” you get the impression that the companies believe that the normal population is also thoroughly progressive. That’s not the case.

The tide has now changed and more people have become skeptical about the green ideology. But that won’t impress the missionaries in the advertising agencies. If I were to start an advertising agency today, I would do so with the promise that my advertising campaigns would be guaranteed not to be sustainable, woke or green, but would be aimed exclusively at consumers and their needs in order to sell more products for my clients. Might this just catch on?

Rainer Zitelmann is the author of In Defence of Capitalism.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life

Žižek condemned Hamas’ terrorist attacks on the Israeli population, but he also said that it is important to listen to the Palestinians and consider the background of the conflict in order to understand it. Several guests left the hall in protest, including Uwe Becker, anti-Semitism commissioner for the state of Hessen, who had earlier challenged Žižek first before and later while he was on stage. Becker accused the prominent philosopher of relativizing the crimes of Hamas. 

It was a scandalous decision by the book fair’s organizers to invite Žižek to give the opening speech. A scandal that proves once again that large parts of the intellectual elite in the West are blind in the left eye. Who is this man? 

Žižek is one of those intellectuals who tend to express themselves in a confused, nebulous and unclear manner, and quite rightly hopes that some of his readers will reverently mistake his vague verbiage for philosophical depth. Žižek is not unclear, however, when it comes to making political statements. In his book A Left that Dares Speak Its Name, published in 2020, Žižek calls for a “new communism”:  “What we need today is a Left that dares to speak its name, not a Left that shamefully covers up its core with some cultural fig leaf. And this name is communism.” The Left, he argues, should finally abandon the socialist dream of a more equitable and “‘just’ capitalism” and enact more radical “‘communist’ measures.” As a clearly formulated goal, he states that “the opposing class has to be destroyed.“

Žižek extols “Lenin’s greatness,” which lay in the fact that, after the Bolsheviks seized power, he held steadfast to his socialist principles, even though the conditions did not exist for an actual “construction of socialism.” According to the theories developed by Marx and Lenin, “socialism” is a necessary transitional stage until the final goal of communism is reached. Žižek suggests reversing this sequence and aiming directly for communism, which should then eventually evolve or regress into socialism. 

According to Žižek, the “Great Leap Forward” in the late 1950s under Mao – the biggest socialist experiment in the history of mankind – presented an opportunity to “bypass socialism and directly enter communism.” Unfortunately, many people do not know anything about Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”. Based on analyses carried out by the Chinese security service and the extensive confidential reports published by party committees during the final months of the “Great Leap Forward,” the historian Frank Dikötter arrives at the following conclusion: At least 45 million people died unnecessary deaths as a result of this grand socialist experiment between 1958 and 1962. The majority died of starvation, while another 2.5 million were tortured or beaten to death – deliberately deprived of food and starved to death. And it is precisely this “Great Leap Forward” that Žižek extols so euphorically. 

Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” also provided the model for the communist terror in Cambodia. Between a fifth and a quarter of Cambodia’s population perished from mid-1975 to early 1979—estimates range from 1.6 to 2.2 million people. The Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot called the “Super Great Leap Forward.” Žižek declared that the Khmer Rouge had not gone far enough: “The Khmer Rouge were, in a way not radical enough: while they took the abstract negation of the past to the limit, they did not invent any new form of collectivity.” All the same, he added: “Revolutionary violence should be celebrated as ‘redemptive’ and even ‘divine.’” 

The sociologist Paul Hollander commented: “Žižek’s beliefs appear to be rooted in an unshakeable conviction that nothing exceeds the evils of capitalism and the violence it generates. It was a conviction shared to varying degrees by many Western intellectuals who were attracted to dictators of different political persuasion and who had in common an anti-capitalist disposition.”

It should also be noted here that Žižek is an admirer of Che Guevara and called Stalin’s terror in the 1930s a “humanist terror”: “Stalinism saved the humanity of man.” 

In an article in The New York Review under the title “The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek,” you can see which photo hangs above Žižek’s bed – that of the mass murderer Josef W. Stalin.

Detailed references for Žižek’s quotations can be found in Rainer Zitelmann’s book In Defence of Capitalism

As a result of the successive transformation of the German energy industry into a planned economy, prices for electricity have continued to rise – even before the onset of the war in Ukraine, they were among the highest in the world. The German economy is straining under these burdens, and more and more companies are relocating or at least seriously considering moving abroad. The chemical giant BASF recently announced that it would be implementing massive job cuts in Germany and investing billions in China. The company blamed its move on the horrendous cost of electricity in Germany and the extreme bureaucracy. Many other companies have already announced that they will be exiting Germany in favour of the USA or Asia.

Politicians see the consequences of their interventionism but are planning to respond with even more intervention. German politicians are now calling for a heavily subsidised industrial electricity price cap for large companies. This means: first, government intervention pushes electricity prices up to unaffordable levels, then the taxpayer is supposed to step in and massively subsidise electricity costs for large companies. Ostensibly, this is only temporary, because electricity prices, the government promises, will become cheaper and cheaper thanks to renewable energies.

This is, of course, an illusion. The guiding principle of German energy policy is: “All Electric – Renewables Only.” However, this policy is set to more than double the demand for electricity and will do so in no time at all. Wind and solar power capacities would need to more than quadruple. Since wind and solar power are highly volatile, Germany would need huge storage and reserve capacities. “However, this is neither technically feasible nor affordable for a country like Germany. It is simply insanity,” said one of Germany’s best-known business executives, Wolfgang Reitzle.

The “industrial electricity price cap” is not the only example. For 20 years, politicians in Germany have made building unaffordable by imposing ever stricter environmental regulations and ever more red tape and bureaucracy. The results of this policy were not clearly apparent as long as mortgage rates remained at historic lows. Now that interest rates are slowly returning to “normal,” it has become impossible to build under these conditions. New construction in Germany has flatlined.

At the same time, government regulations have been tightened over and over again. First, a so-called “rental price brake” was introduced. However, as this did not work and rents continued to rise, the rental price brake was extended and tightened. With fewer and fewer new dwellings being built and millions of refugees coming to Germany at the same time, rents are now skyrocketing again. And what are left-wing politicians in Germany now demanding? A rent freeze. 

This is another typical example of the spiral of intervention: when politicians see that their market interventions are not working, they conclude that they must launch even more drastic interventions in the market. This process was described as early as 1949 by the German economist Alexander Rüstow: “The state begins to intervene, with the intention of limiting itself to these specific interventions. However, these interventions have unpredictable consequences, which in turn necessitate new interventions beyond the scope of the government’s original interventions. 

“This pattern repeats with every new round of interventions, and so on ad infinitum. And if the limit of the state’s intervention is not defined in principle, clearly and reasonably, from the outset, if the private economists of any economic sector which has hitherto been left free must reckon with the possibility that sooner or later the state will extend its interventions into their sphere in an unpredictable manner, there is no longer any foundation for long-term planning and sound management.”

Rainer Zitelmann is a historian, sociologist and author of the book In Defence of Capitalism.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life

The Netherlands was one of the first and strongest capitalist countries. Its economic progressiveness was one reason why this small country (with a population of just two million at the time) rose to become the world’s leading power and trading nation. In the seventeenth century, this little country was, according to the authors, “the leading economy in the world”. 

During this period, “Dutch ships dominated the world’s seas and Dutch merchants spun an intercontinental commercial network in which grain, wine, spices, sugar, tobacco, porcelain, and humans were bought and sold. They developed new ways of doing business, the best known of which is the financing of commercial enterprises through the issuing of shares.”

The driving force behind the Netherlands’ global expansion was not the state, but the first two joint stock companies in history, the Dutch East India Company (VOC), founded in 1602, and the Dutch West India Company (WIC).

To date, the Netherlands is one of the most economically free countries in the world. In the Index of Economic Freedom 2023, which ranks economic freedom in 176 countries, the Netherlands comes in at No. 8 – far ahead of the U.S. (No. 25) and the U.K. (No. 28), which are often referred to as the birthplaces of capitalism. The Heritage Foundation, which compiles the Index of Economic Freedom (widely regarded as a “capitalism ranking”), praises above all the strong rule of law in the Netherlands and the healthy state of government finances. However, it awards negative ratings for “government spending” and the Netherlands’ excessive tax burden. 

Although the Index of Economic Freedom ranks the Netherlands as a whole as one of the most economically free countries in the world, capitalism and the market economy have a poorer image here than in almost any other country in the world. A survey on popular perceptions of the market economy and capitalism I commissioned Ipsos MORI to conduct in 34 countries in 2021 and 2022 for my book In Defense of Capitalism showed that there are only seven countries in which capitalism is more firmly rejected than in the Netherlands.

And this is by no means only due to the word “capitalism,” which is anathema in the Netherlands. The survey also included several questions that deliberately avoided using the word capitalism and instead described a free-market system – without using the inflammatory word itself. The results were no better. On the contrary: only in two of 34 countries, Russia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, was the image of the market economy even worse than in the Netherlands! 

According to the survey, higher earners and those who place themselves on the right of the political spectrum are quite indifferent toward the market economy and capitalism: in many other countries, high earners and those on the right of the political spectrum are usually among the staunchest advocates of capitalism. 

All of the data from the Netherlands point in the same direction: the Dutch reject the market economy and capitalism. The statements that received the greatest support in the Netherlands were “Capitalism promotes selfishness and greed” (44%) and “Capitalism leads to growing inequality” (41%). In contrast, the statement “Capitalism is an especially efficient economic system” received the least support (9%).

At the same time, the Netherlands has long been extraordinarily economically successful. At EUR 73,000, GDP per capita in 2022 was higher than in Germany, Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy and most other European countries. And in 2022, the Netherlands was the fourth strongest exporting nation in the world, ahead of Japan and South Korea. This is remarkable, especially considering that the Netherlands has only 17.5 million inhabitants – Germany as the third largest exporting country has five times more inhabitants, No. 1 China has 84 times more inhabitants and the United States, as No. 2, has 20 times more inhabitants than the Netherlands. 

From this example, it is clear just how long-lasting the impact of historical and economic traditions can be. Even though the Netherlands has long since ceased to be the world’s leading economic power, there is no country of comparable size that exports as many goods to the world as the Netherlands – and Europe’s largest port is also located in Rotterdam. The Dutch should love capitalism more, because it has, after all, made them so successful.

Rainer Zitelmann is a historian, sociologist and author of the book In Defence of Capitalism

According to the latest polls, support for the right-wing AfD party continues to grow. The AfD is now the second strongest party in Germany, with a prospective share of between 18 and 22 percent of the vote, and has managed to cement its position as the strongest party in many of Germany’s eastern states. At its European party congress, the AfD elected Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament, as its lead candidate for next year’s European elections.

Krah recently published a “manifesto” – Politics from the Right (Maximilian Krah, Politik von rechts. Ein Manifest, Verlag Antoaios, Schnellroda, 2023) – in which he laid out his policy aims, including on the economy. The book is revealing because the AfD’s official manifesto was adopted in the spring of 2016 when the party’s pro-market wing was a great deal stronger than it is today. What Krah writes is likely to better reflect current mainstream thinking within the AfD than the party’s seven-year-old policy program.

Just like politicians from all parties in Germany – up to the left wing of the SPD and Die Linke – Krah also makes a striking commitment to private property and the market economy. But more important than these striking professions are the limitations. “Right-wing politics, which is built around the rootedness of the human being, a life centered on the ego, with identity as the fundamental concept, is thus always in tension with the market,” says Krah, the AfD’s lead candidate. The market shows “no consideration for tradition, nature or identity” and has no “human dignity.” And that, according to Krah, is why right-wing parties should resolutely oppose “market radicalism.”

“Market radicalism” is a term that left-wing anti-capitalists are also very fond of. And just like the left, Krah emphasises “the primacy of political interests” over the market. His “manifesto” is dotted with terms typically associated with anti-capitalist, anti-consumerism, for example, when he attacks the “trash and filth of our throwaway society.” Krah is generally skeptical about the benefits of the prosperity of the “Western, liberal economy,” because this prosperity has marginalised those on the right of the political spectrum. 

Of course, Krah makes space to criticise the “sell-off of almost all of Germany’s biggest corporations” to the U.S. “vulture capitalists at Blackrock,” echoing recent broadsides from the CDU leader Friedrich Merz. Krah is equally skeptical when it comes to globalisation, because, in his opinion, it goes “hand in hand with extreme liberalism.” His views on free trade are similar. He declares his commitment to free trade, and then immediately follows up with a long list of caveats. Trade restrictions are necessary, he says, because “products carry political and cultural messages.” As an example, Krah cites Coca Cola, which stands for the “American way of life” and thus promotes “cultural transformation.” 

National and regional platforms, Krah argues, should take the place of global brands such as Google. The political right, he proposes, should also not shy away from opposing “elite migration” – meaning board members of companies who are not of German descent. Russian vodka instead of Coca Cola and a ban on work for managers without a German passport?

Krah also sets his sights on “plutocratic capitalism.” In his opinion, it is necessary to tackle the scourge of the super-rich, especially when the accumulation of wealth – as with internet pioneers – has taken place in one generation. The goals of these super-rich are “mostly opaque and ultimately sinister,” he explains. It is also bad when companies strive to gain “potentially the whole world as a customer.” On this point, he is grateful that “Right-wing economics, however, is based on the idea that states have economies, and not that a global economy has states as mere subsidiaries.”

Most of Krah’s affirmations would probably also attract the support of left-wingers, in some respects they are not unusual, but expressions of the anti-capitalist consensus that has developed in Germany today. The only reason they are remarkable is because left-wing opponents continue to criticize the AfD for its “market radicalism” and “economic liberalism,” even though it has gradually abandoned its previous economic policy positions. 

It may be that there are still a few isolated free-market supporters in the AfD, but the election of Maximilian Krah is further evidence that a different position has now prevailed. This has given the AfD a boost in recent elections, especially in eastern Germany, where anti-capitalism is even more widespread than in the west. It has also succeeded in winning over sections of the electorate from Die Linke and the SPD.

Incidentally, the book’s foreword was written by the AfD’s founder and honorary chairman Alexander Gauland: “The fact that some of his insights echo Sahra Wagenknecht [a former leading figure in the DIE LINKE party),” Gauland praises, “is what makes the whole thing even more exciting … Maximilian Krah and Sahra Wagenknecht are united by social conservatism.”

We see the same tendency in Europe: Anti-capitalism is not only intensifying on the Left, but it is also increasing on the Right. The radical Right in many European countries — France, for example — has adopted traditionally left-wing economic policies. 

The author has also published the book In Defence of Capitalism

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life     

His book “calls for a political revolution in which working people come together.” The rich are portrayed in an exclusively negative light. He fills page after page with descriptions of the luxurious lives of the rich that are meant to create envy, but has nothing to say about the great entrepreneurial achievements that made these people rich in the first place. 

And what Sanders does not say is that the top 20 per cent of households in the US pay 83 per cent of all federal taxes. What’s more, the top 0.001 percent of Americans, i.e. those whom Sanders so unremittingly targets in his book, pay 39.8 per cent in taxes. Readers won’t find any of these facts in Sanders’ new book as he is far more concerned with constantly asserting that the rich do not pay enough taxes.

“The corporate elite are not nice guys … They are ruthless, and day after day they sacrifice human life and well-being in order to protect their privilege”. According to Sanders, America is a terrible land: “The majority of Americans live lives of quiet desperation”. Over and over again, he repeats the thesis that over the past 50 years the standard of living of average Americans has not improved – an oft-parroted assertion that is simply not true. 

He explicitly equates super-rich Americans with the corrupt oligarchs in Russia. This is, to say the last, quite an affront: America’s super-rich, people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, have become rich by developing and marketing products that benefit billions of people around the world. Russia’s super-rich have often become rich through corruption and are mostly rentiers living off profits from oil and gas.

What is Sanders’ alternative to this dreadful America? First of all, he calls for the total abolition of billionaires – he even devotes an entire chapter to it. A country without billionaires? You would have to look to North Korea, Cuba or the poorest African countries for that. Does Sanders want the US to be that kind of country? Apparently so, because even in Sweden, which Sanders often praised as a model in the past, the share of billionaires in the total population is 60 percent higher than in the United States! 

In the America that Sanders envisions, little would remain of today’s Constitution. He describes the Supreme Court as a gathering of “right-wing judicial activists”. It is, he writes, “unacceptable and anti-democratic that a handful of unelected lifetime appointees exert the kind of political power they do”. He does not openly call for the abolition of the Supreme Court or the Senate, but he does say that these institutions should be “rethought”. In general, he does not think much of the American Constitution, because it dates back to 1787 and is no longer suited to addressing modern concerns, according to Sanders.

In the Constitution as he envisages it, employment would have to be “guaranteed.” This is not a new idea; it was the case in most socialist constitutions. The result was a frighteningly high “hidden unemployment” in these countries. The other things Sanders suggests were also common in socialist countries, e.g. “rent control.” In the GDR, for example, there was a rent freeze that resulted in most of the housing stock being either severely dilapidated or crumbling to pieces. 

As a German, I was surprised at the Sanders’ praise for Germany: “Germany maintains carefully plotted industrial policies that allow them to prepare for the future.“ He is obviously referring to Germany’s energy policy. This is absurd: Germany started by shutting down its nuclear power plants, then its coal-fired power plants, and then it banned fracking. Germany now has the gravest energy problems. The price of electricity was already the highest in the world before the war in Ukraine and almost three times as high as in the United States. Today, Germany is forced to import LNG gas from the US, while fracking is banned in its own country. A model for the US?

As far as the health system is concerned, he praises Britain’s National Health Service – a system that has become a nightmare for many Britons. The fact is that around 8 million Brits have private medical insurance, and around 53 percent say they would like to invest in some sort of private scheme.

All in all, with his book, Sanders has proven he is far more than just a “moderate social democrat.” No, he is a class warrior who wants to turn the United States into a socialist country. 

Rainer Zitelmann is the author of the new book In Defence of Capitalism 

In American election campaigns it is widely accepted that if you want to become president, you will only succeed if you can raise billions of dollars in donations -– from Wall Street, from powerful pharmaceutical and defence companies, from the weapons lobby, from very large unions and other special interest groups.

And that is not all: Critics of social inequality claim that the problem is getting worse, that with rising inequality the influence exerted by the rich on politics is growing. Noam Chomsky writes that “the real concentration of power is in a fraction of one per cent” of the population: “They get exactly what they want, because they’re basically running the place.”

But if money alone bought political power, Donald Trump would never have become the Republican candidate for the US presidency in 2016. That honour would more likely have gone to Jeb Bush, who was able to raise far more in political donations. Even Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, political scientists and two of the most prominent proponents of the thesis that US politics is determined by the rich, concede that most of the big-money contributors – and most Republican think-tankers and officeholders – supported other candidates. And: “Trump’s positions went directly contrary to the views of wealthy donors and wealthy Americans generally.”

Furthermore, if money determined political outcomes, Trump would not have won the 2016 election. Clinton and her allies, including her joint committees with the Democratic Party and the super PACs that supported her, raised more than $1.2 billion for the full cycle, according to the Federal Election Commission. Trump and his allies collected about $600 million. Not one CEO in the Fortune 100 donated to Trump’s election campaign by September 2016.

If money alone could buy political power, then Joe Biden would also not have become president. Perhaps the White House would have gone to Michael Bloomberg, who at the time of his application for the Democratic candidacy was the eighth richest man in the world, worth $61.9 billion according to Forbes. In all likelihood, Bloomberg spent more of his own money (and spent it quicker) on his election campaign than any other candidate in history, namely $1 billion in just over three months. Bloomberg financed his campaign himself and did not accept any donations.

Bloomberg is by no means the only candidate whose wealth did not help him realise his political ambitions. In 2020, billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer put up $200 million of his own fortune and ended up without a single delegate. In the 2008 GOP primaries, Mitt Romney spent more than twice as much as John McCain – much of which was his own money – but he dropped out of the race in February and McCain went on to secure the Republican nomination.

The Koch brothers have always been portrayed by critics of capitalism as among the most dangerous pro-capitalists on the planet, but David Koch learned just how hard it is to turn money into political power back in 1980, when he was one of the main supporters of the Libertarian Party and threw his hat into the ring as a candidate for vice president: he earned just one per cent of the vote.

In his book Unequal Democracy, Larry M. Bartels criticises inequality and the influence of the wealthy in the United States. He examined the estimated effect of unequal campaign spending in 16 US presidential elections from 1952 to 2012, concluding that Republican candidates outspent their Democratic opponents in 13 of those elections. But in only two elections, namely that of Richard Nixon in 1968 and that of George W. Bush in 2000 does Bartels conclude that Republican candidates won close elections that they very likely would have lost had they been unable to outspend their Democratic opponents.

There has been a great deal of research into the relationship between the wealth of American congressmen and their voting behaviour. Martin Gilens, who generally criticises the influence of the rich on US politics, concedes on this issue that there is no evidence of a connection between their wealth and the political decisions made by members of Congress or the House of Representatives: “…the substantial existing differences in economic status among members of Congress are not related to broad patterns of voting on economic policy.”

Sociologist and historian Rainer Zitelmann is the author of In Defence of Capitalism: Debunking the myths which will be published on 7 March 2023.

The more power the state has, the more likely it is that lobbyism and corruption will flourish.  Countries with overly powerful governments also tend to be countries with rampant corruption. Russia, for instance, ranks a poor 136th (out of 180) in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. In the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, Russia is a distant 113th. From countries such as Russia, it is clear that we need more – not less – capitalism where the ties between business and politics are too close.

Capitalism and Corruption

Many people associate “capitalism” with “corruption.” But, as the economist Alan H. Meltzer wrote: “Offenses such as bribery can be either public or private and are common in many nations, but they are most common where government officials have the most authority.” The view that corruption is particularly prevalent in capitalist countries is wrong. The opposite is true, as confirmed by a comparison of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and the Index of Economic Freedom.

The Index of Economic Freedom, published by theHeritage Foundation since 1995, is widely regarded as a capitalism ranking. According to the Index, the countries with the lowest levels of corruption also have the highest degree of economic freedom. The ten countries with the least corruption are all, without exception, in the Index’s “free” or “mostly free” categories: Singapore, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Switzerland and the Netherlands are among the ten most corruption-free countries in the world – and they are all among the ten most economically free countries! 

Conversely, countries in the bottom ten of the Corruption Perceptions Index are also classed as “repressed” in the Index of Economic Freedom. The two worst performers in the Index of Economic Freedom, Venezuela and North Korea, are also among the worst performers in the Corruption Perceptions Index. The more the state intervenes in economic life, the greater the opportunities to bribe government officials. Anyone who wants to limit unethical or even criminal influence on political policy by the wealthy should therefore not advocate for bigger, but for smaller government.

Less regulation = less corruption

I recently visited Georgia, a country where corruption used to be endemic. I met the economist Professor Gia Jandieri, an instrumental figure in the fight against corruption, who explained the most effective anti-corruption measures (apart from dismissing all 35,000 or so police officers in one fell swoop): “At least as important for fighting corruption was that reforms eliminated many superfluous regulations and rules.” This provides a key lesson for other countries: Cutting government regulation also reduces opportunities for corruption. In 2004, Georgia ranked as low as 133rd in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. By 2021, it had climbed to 45th out of 180.

What lessons can the EU learn from this? Well, the EU regulates more and more areas of life. As a result, the EU also opens more and more doors to special interest lobbyists and even corruption. It would not be surprising if the corruption uncovered so far is just the tip of the iceberg. As we have seen elsewhere, less red tape, smaller government and less power in the hands of politicians could be among the most effective measures for the EU to deploy in its fight against corruption.

Rainer Zitelmann also addresses this topic in his book In Defense of Capitalism.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life

“Development aid is a project that carries out ineffective activities for an unachievable goal – poverty reduction – for a wrongly selected target group – African smallholder farmers – with a method that does not work – help for self-help – in an ineffective format – the project – which, like flash in the pan, leaves no lasting traces on anyone involved apart from fond memories, uses most of the funds for project implementation and thus takes what was originally a good idea and wastes a great deal of money.”

The fight against poverty remains one of the most important tasks facing humanity, but development aid (the politically correct word for this is now “development cooperation”) is the wrong means to achieve this noble goal. In many cases, it has accomplished nothing. In others, it has actually achieved the very opposite of what was intended.

Helpless help for self-help experts

In his book 50 Jahre Entwicklungshilfe – 50 Jahre Strohfeuer (50 Years of Development Aid – 50 Years of Flash in the Pan), Bremer reproduces a dialogue between the head of a village community and a German development worker (“self-help expert”), which is fictional but made up of snippets of actual conversations and is based on Bremer’s decades of practical experience in the field. Bremer had conducted the progress check for this project. It’s worth quoting in full. C is the head of the village community and S is the self-help expert.

C: “Sir, we need a small dam to provide water for our cattle and farmers in the dry season.”

S: “That is a very sensible goal, but let me explain what you need first. You need to improve your management capacities to tackle a project like a dam; you need analytical tools, meetings and training on how to hold meetings and deal with group dynamics, as well as thinking about how to involve women; you need negotiation and decision-making techniques, which you can learn by consulting our experts, you need…”

C: “Oh sir, it seems as if that will all take a lot of time. If fresh water stays in the mouth too long, it turns into saliva. And our dam?”

S: “One step at a time, you need to be more process-oriented. Believe me, our self-help specialists know what you need to get your dam.”

C: “Okay, once we’ve done all that, do we get our dam?”

S: “It is certainly possible. But before you tackle a big project like a dam, you should start small, e.g. digging a well by hand, without a pump and winch or anything.”

C: “Sir, we have enough wells and boreholes, and some of them even have hand pumps. What we need is a dam.”

S: “Ask the women in the village. I’m sure there are some who don’t have a well yet.”

C: “Okay, the beggar doesn’t have a well. We’ll dig one for him. Will we get a dam then?”

S: “That depends on you. Fifty-fifty participation in cash, plus provision of labour and building materials; cash to be paid in advance.”

C: “Fifty per cent, Sir? That’s too much for most families.”

S: “That’s as may be, but if you don’t contribute 50 per cent, your long-term ownership-feeling won’t be strong enough. 49 per cent is not enough.”

C: “Okay, you’ll get your 50 per cent. Will we then get our dam?”

S: “That depends on so many factors: Can we finance the other 50 per cent? Is it technically feasible? Do we have enough time? Anyway, always remember that for you the learning process is more important than the result. See you in the next meeting.”

“Help for self-help?”

Bremer promises that, although the above dialogue sounds like a caricature, it actually happened. As a result, not a single dam or retention basin was built, but the target group was taught, in theory, how to help themselves.

In his eviscerating book, Bremer criticises the very principle of development aid, which is based on so-called “projects.” Although there is so much talk about sustainability today, these projects are rarely sustainable. Hardly anyone is concerned with what has become of such projects, for example, ten years after they have come to an end.

If you drive through the African countryside, you will constantly pass rusting project signs, sometimes even from several donors in the same place: They look like grave markers, the last remaining signs that something was once there. There is no money left, not even enough to dismantle the signs at the end of the project – at best they are used by village blacksmiths to make cooking pots.

While they were running, many of these projects were quite successful, as there was enough money for materials, operating resources, vehicles and high salaries. But once the funding dried up, it became clear that these highly subsidised projects were all nothing more than “uneconomic flashes in the pan,” of which nothing remained once they ended.

Flash in the pan projects

Bremer knows Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) particularly well, a country in West Africa that is the world’s largest exporter of cocoa. As early as 1977, the ethnologist, sociologist and development economist wrote his doctoral thesis on the history of cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire and still lives there today. His assessment of the development aid projects in the country is harsh: With the exception of a forestry project, not one of the 24 completed projects had a long-term impact: “Assessed against this criterion, they were all failures or just flashes in the pan, costing a total of €125 million.”

Another example he provides concerns the construction and maintenance of a veterinary pharmacy in Burundi’s economic capital Bujumbura. The project lasted 22 years with the same seconded specialist, but the pharmacy became unviable shortly after funding ended and had to close. “This is what happens,” says Bremer, “when development aid enters private-sector terrain, but dispenses with needs analyses, business plans and profitability calculations and thus uses taxpayers’ money to set up a subsidised playground for seconded professionals.”

When the funding runs out, a project is terminated, although this doesn’t prevent the development workers from setting up a similar project a few years later in the same or another country, the failure of which is equally certain from the outset.

Bremer’s overall conclusion is therefore devastating: “This has been going on for 50 years, and the entire international development aid industry, which is financed with public funds, lives from this kind of project. The alleged beneficiaries, the poor farmers, who are supposed to be helped by these projects, are no less poor at the end and are once again left to fend for themselves. Instead of helping the poor, these projects create countless jobs for seconded professionals and their supervisors at the aid organisations’ headquarters.”

In many cases, fashions dictate which topics receive the most funds. For example, a hype developed around eco-farms: According to Bremer, “for twelve years they remained an inconsequential playground for seconded experts and their technical experts, who pursued the ecological and/or site-appropriate agriculture that has become so fashionable. All in all, about €20 million have been sunk into the Savannah sand on these projects.”

The general public in the donor countries is not interested. The projects are, after all, so far away – and whether they really make a difference or not is a subject to be debated between academics. Politicians and the media are understandably more concerned with the issues that preoccupy and interest voters and readers in the donor countries – and not with the question of whether the billions in development aid are being used wisely.

The examples of successful countries such as China, Poland and Vietnam show that it is not development aid but market-based reforms that achieve the most in the fight against poverty. The dramatic decline in poverty in these countries was not accomplished primarily a result of high development aid payments, it was the result of introducing private property and more capitalism into the system. It is not development aid that is the best instrument in the fight against poverty, but capitalism.

Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist and author of the soon-to-be-published book In Defense of Capitalism.

This piece was originally published in Townhall

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life

Of course, in absolute terms, the US and other developed countries emit more CO₂ than developing countries in Africa. But Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which regularly rates countries on their environmental performance, awards the worst climate change ratings to poor countries. The 2020 Yale EPI Index included a separate chapter (Chapter 11) rating countries on their climate change performance: “Results in the EPI can help identify which countries are on track to decarbonise and which countries must accelerate progress toward a sustainable future.”

The result: The best climate change ratings went to countries such as Denmark, the United Kingdom, Romania, France, Switzerland, Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden and Finland. “Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia exhibit the lowest average regional performance, with countries from these regions receiving 16 of the bottom 20 scores.”

The EPI’s range of indicators includes “Greenhouse gas emission intensity,” i.e., CO₂ emissions per unit of GDP, the growth rate of CO₂ emissions, and emissions per capita.

Many developed capitalist countries have long since succeeded in decoupling CO₂ emissions from GDP growth – but the same cannot be said of lots of countries in Africa, most of which are economically unfree. While environmental activists lay the blame for climate change on capitalism, Yale University’s climate protection ranking finds that countries with a high degree of economic freedom are better performers than those that are economically unfree.

The reason why emissions are lower in absolute terms in developing countries (especially in Africa) is simply their poor economic development. These countries have not managed to provide a decent standard of living for their people and their economies are not free. This is the explanation for both their poverty and their – in absolute terms – lower CO₂ emissions.

And these countries are now demanding money from developed countries to fight climate change. However, as countless development aid programmes have demonstrated, direct grants have not worked in the fight against poverty, because much of the aid ends up being funneled into the wrong channels – to the corrupt governments in these countries. The widespread view that corruption is particularly prevalent in capitalist countries is wrong, as demonstrated by a comparison of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. The countries with the lowest levels of corruption are the same countries that have among the highest levels of economic freedom. Of the 10 countries with the least corruption, all, without a single exception, are in the “free” or “mostly free” categories in the Index of Economic Freedom. Conversely, countries that rank in the bottom 10 in the corruption index are also countries that are economically unfree.

Dambisa Moyo was born in Zambia, studied at Harvard, and earned her doctorate at Oxford. In her book Dead Aid, she singles out development aid from rich countries as one of the major causes of hardship on the continent. Over the past 50 years, Moyo wrote in 2009, more than a trillion dollars in development-related aid was transferred from rich countries to Africa. “But has more than US$1 trillion in development assistance over the last several decades made African people better off? No. In fact, across the globe the recipients of this aid are worse off; much worse off. Aid has helped make the poor poorer, and growth slower… The notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty, and has done so, is a myth. Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but have increased.” Moyo cites a World Bank study that states that more than 85 per cent of aid was used for purposes other than originally intended, often diverted to unproductive projects.

It will be no different if billions of dollars are transferred from rich to poor countries to mitigate the impacts of climate change. In the fight against climate change, it is not development aid – and certainly not the abolition of capitalism – that will help, but more capitalism.

Rainer Zitelmann is author of  “The Power of Capitalism”

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Inflation was a big topic. In his speech, Steve Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine, distinguished between two types of inflation: “non-monetary inflation” and “monetary inflation.” Non-monetary inflation is caused by external events, such as the current Ukraine war or supply chain bottlenecks. The state should do nothing about this type of inflation because it disappears when the causes disappear. More serious, he says, is monetary inflation, which is caused by central banks’ monetary policies. Forbes is among the harshest critics of the Fed, which was still printing gigantic amounts of money even in 2021, when the economy had long since recovered.

Like some other libertarians, Forbes is a supporter of the gold standard: “The gold-based Bretton Woods monetary system that was created in the closing days of the Second World War and blown up on 15 August, 1971 had worked remarkably well. Unfortunately, our political leaders and most economists back then didn’t understand the basics of a gold-based system or how to manage it.” In the event of inflation, Forbes explained, politicians and central bankers naturally denied any responsibility for it and looked for scapegoats (e.g., large international oil companies) to blame.

Beyond inflation, Freedom Fest focused on the topics that move libertarians: growing government intervention in people’s lives and the economy, political correctness and cancel culture, criticism of the prevailing energy policy and pleas for nuclear energy. Or the question of whether gold or Bitcoin is the best hedge against inflation. Those who think – like many Europeans – that the United States is the land of unbridled capitalism were disabused of their belief by the fact that for the very first time, government spending in the United States hit 50 per cent of GDP. As a cautionary example, many speakers repeatedly turned to Germany, where ideologically motivated interventions in the energy industry have created huge problems. We don’t want to become like Germany – that was the warning in many speeches.

Arguments about “election fraud”

In one respect, however, most of the participants would prefer a system like that in Germany. When asked who would like a two-party system like the one in the US, hardly any participants responded. There was almost unanimous agreement that America needs more political parties – and it was not only supporters of the Libertarian Party, which was also represented in large numbers at Freedom Fest, who held this opinion.

The discussion heated up when it came to the topic of “election fraud.” Radio host Wayne Allyn Root argued that Joe Biden’s victory was made possible by numerous electoral frauds. He received a lot of applause for his claims, while the journalist Isaac Saul, who represented the opposite thesis, was greeted by a chorus of booing. Saul said that, as in every election, there had been electoral fraud, but that it had not had an impact on the outcome of the election. Moreover, numerous judgments from courts up and down America had confirmed that the supporters of the election fraud thesis were wrong.

Apparently, this was not what most of the audience wanted to hear, and Saul was interrupted several times by vehement objections. Finally, moderator John Fund stepped in and explained that if you don’t let a speaker whose opinions you don’t like finish, you are acting just like the left-wing cancel culture supporters you criticise. There was much applause for this statement as well.

“Make George Orwell fiction again”

After all, restricting freedom of expression via cancel culture and political correctness was one of Freedom Fest’s central topics. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter, which take unilateral action against posts perceived as “right-wing,” came in for sharp criticism. The headline over one talk read: “Make George Orwell Fiction Again.”

Many speakers shared their experiences. One particularly absurd example – the satirical website Babylon Bee published a story: “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication.” The story continued: “The custom-made device allows CNN reporters to load just the facts of a given issue, turn a dial to ‘spin cycle,’ and within five minutes, receive a nearly unrecognizable version of the story that’s been spun to fit with the news station’s agenda.” Facebook’s “fact-checkers” determined that no such washing machine exists in reality. In this and similar cases, posts were deleted or social media accounts shut down. However, in the case of CNN and the washing machine, even Facebook had to admit that it was wrong.

The highlight of the festival was the presentation of awards for the best films, including the film Life Behind the Berlin Wall, of which I was a co-producer. The film takes the example of the economies and everyday life in East and West Germany to demonstrate the superiority of the market economy over the planned economy. The film will be shown in schools across America and can also be watched on YouTube.

Rainer Zitelmann is a historian, sociologist and author of the books The Power of Capitalism and Hitler’s National Socialism.

A comparison of economic data for 1913 and 2018 shows that real GDP per capita has hardly increased. In fact, Argentina has the worst figures of all countries for which data are available for both years. Inflation is particularly alarming.

I visited Buenos Aires and other Argentine cities last month, talking to economists, politicians, representatives of think tanks, journalists and young people. Here’s what I discovered.

Soaring inflation – and the “Blue Dollar”

I realise what inflation actually means when I pay my hotel bill. I don’t want to pay with my Visa card, because your credit card payment is based on the official exchange rate from the peso to the dollar or euro. You get twice as many pesos for a dollar on the free market – which is illegal but tolerated by the authorities. This unofficial rate is known as the “blue dollar,” the parallel exchange rate of the US dollar in Argentina, which represents the cost of buying and selling a physical dollar bill on the black (or “blue”) market. In reality, my hosts explain, it is much more complicated than that because there are at least four different dollar variants.

The authorities tolerate the existence of so-called “cuevos” (literally, caves), where you can go to exchange dollars or euros into local currency. On the street you are frequently approached by people known as “arbolitos” (Spanish for little trees), who show you the way to one of the many cuevos. Officially, these are pawn shops or places where you can buy and sell jewellery or gold, but in fact they are clandestine Blue Dollar trading houses.

Argentinians use these cuevos to exchange pesos in the hope of getting even more pesos for their dollars a few weeks or months later. In a country with such rampant inflation, money has lost its function as a store of value and only serves as a means of payment. However, this is not always easy. You can’t always get large denomination bills in the cuevos. Only about a fifth of the 250,000 pesos that my interpreter and I have to pay for four days at the Sheraton in Buenos Aires are in thousands. The rest comes in small banknotes. At the hotel, it takes more than two hours to pay. I ask why they don’t use their bill counting machine. I realise it’s because they first have to check the authenticity of every single banknote with a pen and count the money by hand. Once they are finished with the lengthy process of counting the bills by hand, they eventually run the money through the bill counter.

For Argentinians, inflation is nothing unusual. I meet Fausto Spotorno, chief economist of the Centro de Estudios Económicos of the consultancy OJF. He presents impressive statistics confirming that since 1945 Argentina has almost always had at least double-digit inflation – with the exception of the 1990s, when Carlos Menem pegged the currency to the US dollar, which eliminated inflation for a decade but had a negative impact on exports as Argentinian goods were no longer competitive.

Anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei

Inflation also happens to be the main theme of the libertarian movement around Javier Milei. The 51-year-old, who describes himself as an “anarcho-capitalist,” used to be the goalkeeper for the Chacarita Juniors soccer club, went on to study economics and then became a chief economist at private financial consulting firms and a government advisor.

In 2021, Milei was elected to represent the city of Buenos Aires in the Cámara de Diputados de la Nación Argentina after gaining 17 per cent of the vote for the La Libertad Avanza party. Everyone expects him to be a candidate in the 2023 presidential election.

I talked to the libertarian activist and vice-president of Milei’s party, Lilia Lemoine. This extremely attractive 41-year-old, who I would have guessed to be 30 at most, is a cosplayer, model and actress and major social media figure with hundreds of thousands of followers. Her website features a photo, wearing a top emblazoned with a fist and the words “Libre Mercado” (free market economy).

Lemoine is full of enthusiasm for Milei, who is formally the party’s honorary chairman. She is famous all over Argentina, and when we go to eat, the waiter immediately asks if he can take a selfie with her. Milei’s supporters are mostly young, poor and male, she says. She explains that the belief that poor people don’t want to work and have become accustomed to state benefits, which we often hear here, is a lie: “That is only true for very few. Most of them would very much like to work, but the state, by imposing such high taxes and regulations, does not give them a real chance. These poor people are desperate, especially because of inflation. They have pinned their hopes on our libertarian movement.”

That is what is special about Argentina: desperate poor people in other countries are often more in favor of socialism and bigger government – or else right-wing extremists. There are not many other countries where you will find poor people who want more capitalism.

Milei has attracted a lot of attention by launching a “lottery.” Anyone who signs up on social media is entered into a lottery to win Milei’s monthly salary as a deputy of the Cámara de Diputados. In May 2022, that was 350,000 pesos, or about $1,800. Considering that the income of an average Argentinian is roughly 60,000 pesos, this is an attractive sum. In the first three months alone, Lemoine says, two million Argentinians have taken part in the lottery, with which Milei wants to show: “I didn’t get into politics for the money.” Each participant has to provide an email address and phone number, and at first I think this is a very cheap way to get people’s contact details for campaign advertising. Lemoine, meanwhile, assures me that the data will only be used for the lottery. Either way, it is a very effective marketing method.

I meet the congressman Ricardo López Murphy. He too hopes for a free-market turnaround, but is not as radical as Milei, who wants to abolish the central bank, for example. López Murphy, who cooperates also with the German Naumann Foundation, is an economist and was Minister of Defense and Economics during Fernando de la Rúa’s presidency. Since 2021, he has been the leader of the Republicanos Unidos party, which he founded in 2020 and which is part of the JTC Juntos por el Cambio (Cambiemos) alliance. He is also regarded as a potential presidential candidate. What would he do if he were in charge in Argentina? Above all, he would fight protectionism, cut red tape and regulations (e.g. in the labour market) and radically reduce taxes. Currently, companies with at least 200 employees are forced to sell a certain percentage of their products at prices set by the state. A major problem he and others are addressing: Because of the high tax burden, the informal economy, i.e. undeclared work, is extremely important, he explains. It is estimated that more people are working illegally today than are in official employment, says López Murphy.

“We need a capitalist revolution”

López Murphy is one of the figureheads of Argentina’s free market movement. Another is José Luis Espert. Like Milei and López Murphy, Espert is also an economist and is convinced that more capitalism is the solution for Argentina. He has been a deputy in Buenos Aires province for the Avanza Libertad coalition since 2021. “We need a capitalist revolution,” he tells me. And he is optimistic: “Libertarian ideas are really taking off in Argentina,” says Espert. Milei, incidentally, used to be a member of Espert’s party before he founded his own party. What would Espert change in Argentina if he could? First of all, he mentions the issue of “trade freedom,” i.e. the fight against protectionism and excessive taxation and for more deregulation. He also thinks that several corrupt trade union leaders should be put in jail to deter others.

I was surprised when I meet three young women in Buenos Aires. They belong to LOLA, Ladies for Libertad. Valentina is 21 years old, speaks fluent English and seems very self-confident. She comes from the city of Mendoza, started her own recycling business at the age of 13 and made it official at 18. But the first few years were really hard: “Every day, robbers came to my company to steal from me. I called the police, who even put the thieves in jail once, but only for a few hours before releasing them again. The police do not protect me. And the state takes almost everything I earn with its extreme taxation.” And she doesn’t like the mentality of many compatriots who prefer to live off the state rather than work themselves: “It’s so hard to find employees,” she complains.

That’s why she became a libertarian. At 17, she joined the Students for Liberty. At 19, she founded her own libertarian group. The group grew quickly, attracting many members who opposed the government’s Corona measures: “We had a seven-month curfew, you were only allowed out of the house for three hours on certain days to go shopping.” These measures led more and more members to their group.

They meet in apartments and restaurants and compare, for example, Marx’s Communist Manifesto with Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. It is a group for women who describe themselves as “liberal feminists,” in distinction to traditional feminists who – according to Valentina – are mostly Marxists. Their hero is Javier Milei.

Adrina is 27 years old. She fled Venezuela because she was sentenced to prison after joining the protests against the socialist regime. She studied law in Venezuela, but in Buenos Aires she works as an IT programmer. She got involved in politics when her sister and brother-in-law were sent to prison after protesting against the socialist dictatorship. Her parents fled to Peru to escape the economic catastrophe. Adrina now lives in Buenos Aires and is involved with LOLA. I realise: just as it is considered cool for many young people in western countries to be left-wing, it is cool here to be libertarian. Even in Tucumán, a provincial town in the north where there is little to see apart from crumbling houses and poverty, I give a lecture to 70 young people who attend courses at a libertarian think tank. They are against the establishment, against the over-reaching state and live firmly in the hope that more capitalism will solve their problems.

Dr Rainer Zitelmann is a Berlin-based historian and sociologist. His book, The Power of Capitalism, was released in 2019.

This is precisely what happened in Germany, where the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) was initially founded in 2013 as a party with an economically liberal program. Gradually, however, pro-market economy members left the party in frustration and the right-wing anti-capitalists increased their influence. This tendency is particularly strong in eastern Germany, where it feeds on the notion of ‘social patriotism’ and thus wins over many voters who previously voted for the far-left Die Linke party (the latest incarnation of the SED, which formerly ruled East Germany and has changed its name several times in recent decades).

However, right-wing anti-capitalism also has a theoretical basis – for example, thanks to authors such as Benedikt Kaiser and Götz Kubitschek from the right-wing Institut für Staatspolitik thinktank. They tap into a long historical tradition of right-wing anti-capitalism in Germany – from the so-called “Conservative Revolution” of the Weimar Republic to National Socialism.

The anti-capitalist right’s critique of capitalism and its economic policies differs only slightly from those of the left. In his writings, Kaiser, the best-known pioneer of this movement, repeatedly quotes left-wing authors – from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Thomas Piketty, Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno. The enemies, on the other hand, are “market radicals,” “neoliberals,” and “libertarians” – including Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedmann and Friedrich August von Hayek.

Are left-wingers and big business in cahoots?

The core thesis of right-wing German anti-capitalists is that left-wing multicultural ideologists and big business are in cahoots. The real beneficiaries of mass immigration, they argue, are the capitalists, who benefit from access to a large reservoir of cheap labor. The left-wing ideologues who demand ‘open borders’ are, so the argument goes, in fact pursuing a policy in the interests of capital: “It is not ‘the left that is driving mass migration, even if it approves for ideological reasons and acclaims it in the media. It is primarily driven by what was once called ‘big business’ in the form of industry and business federations.”

On this point in particular, however, questions remain: It is incomprehensible as to why mass immigration should be in the best interest of ‘big business.’ Yes, ‘business’ wants qualified specialists to move to Germany, and this is not only in the interest of companies, but of society as a whole, because it is not clear how demographic problems can realistically be overcome in any other way. But this immigration of qualified workers, which business leaders repeatedly call for, faces a lot of obstacles in Germany. There are countless bureaucratic hurdles for skilled workers, while immigration is comparatively much easier for those seeking to access social benefits – saying the word ‘asylum’ at the border is all it takes. For this reason, mass immigration by people only looking to exploit the welfare system has been taking place in Germany for years, which is of course neither in the interest of ‘big business’ nor workers – and is also something the majority of people in Germany do not want, as all surveys show. In fact, mass immigration by people only looking to exploit the welfare system makes the necessary immigration of skilled workers even more difficult, because the resulting cultural problems reduce the acceptance of immigration across the population as a whole. As this example reveals, the thesis that left-wing multicultural ideologues and ‘big business’ allegedly share the same goals is absurd because it makes no distinction between the type of immigration. There is no doubt that corporate leaders today often compliantly bend to the left-wing/green zeitgeist, but this is a sign of opportunism and not evidence that they are the real driving force behind the shift to the left.

At best, lip service to private ownership

Just as left-wing anti-capitalists in Germany are committed to the ‘social market economy,’ right-wing anti-capitalists say they oppose capitalism but are not against the market economy. But their commitment to the market economy cannot be taken seriously, since the central features of the market economy, such as private ownership, are roundly rejected. As lip service, of course, both left-wing and right-wing anti-capitalists today often profess their support for private ownership, but according to the ‘primacy of politics,’ they want the state to set very narrow limits on ownership. Kaiser approvingly quotes Axel Honneth, a theorist of the Frankfurt School, who raises the question “why mere ownership of the means of production should justify any claim at all to the returns on capital it generates.” Accordingly, parts of the economy should be nationalised. Götz Kubitschek, one of the masterminds of the anti-capitalist right, believes that “the state should ensure the provision of basic services in the areas of transport, banking, communications, education, health, energy, housing, culture and security, and not just create a regulatory framework for private providers, who are primarily concerned with creaming off the most profitable sectors.” The task, according to Kubitschek, is therefore to “nationalise and simultaneously cut red tape” – although he does not seem to recognize that the more the state interferes in the economy, the more bureaucracy inevitably proliferates. Kaiser advocates considering the nationalisation of all sectors of the economy that are crucial to the country’s development, e.g., heavy industry, chemicals and transportation. He also sees no justification for privately operated electricity plants and waterworks, etc. On the other hand, he generously concedes that light and consumer goods industries could remain “fields of activity for cooperative and private capitalist initiative.”

Marx, Engels and Lenin, to whom the right-wing anti-capitalists also frequently refer, would have branded the ideology of the right-wing anti-capitalists as a petty-bourgeois reactionary criticism of capitalism. All large enterprises and corporations are regarded as problematic, while “consumer communities, cooperative village inns, which issue a dividend in the form of a community feast, and farms, which supply their small investors with free food (return on shares)” are idealised. East Germany has been selected as the testing ground for such anti-capitalist dreams. After all, Kaiser argues, surveys show that 75 percent of East Germans are in favour of a socialist system, but believe it has never been correctly implemented.

Another idea: Following Otto Strasser, the leader of the ‘left-wing National Socialists,’ Kaiser proposes the concept of a ‘hereditary fiefdom’ that could replace private ownership. Accordingly, the state would remain the sole owner of land and means of production, leaving the management to the individual “according to ability and worthiness as a hereditary fiefdom.”

Social policies echo those of the left

In all other respects, these social policy proposals are closely aligned with those of Germany’s left-wing parties. The rich are to be burdened more in every respect, for example, by increasing income taxes on top earners and reintroducing the wealth tax, which has not been levied in Germany since 1996. The image of a “cherished and regulated social market economy” or “regulated social market economy of the twenty-first century” (Kaiser) actually has very little to do with a real market economy. The hope of the anti-capitalist right is to bring together national and social elements in one movement, with a hatred of ‘the rich’ common to both. Approvingly, Kaiser cites the demand of former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich: “We need to create a movement that brings right and left together to fight the rich elite.”

The right-wing anticapitalists first set their sights on pushing back or eliminating the AfD’s economic liberal elements to make way for the ‘social patriotism’ propagated by Björn Höcke, the leader of the right-wing of the AfD in eastern Germany.

It is important not to underestimate the right-wing anti-capitalists, because they have already come close to achieving their goal. The synthesis of nationalism and socialism exerts a strong appeal over voters. This is not only proven by recent movements in France (such as the Rassemblement National from the right or the left-wing nationalist Mélenchon movement), it is also clear from German history, which shows just how explosive this mixture of nationalism and socialism can become. This is not to say that the new right-wing anti-capitalists are national socialists in the traditional sense, but their movement certainly combines the ideologies of nationalism and socialism.

Rainer Zitelmann is the author of the recently published book Hitler’s National Socialism.

Globally, Russia ranks only 113th in the most recently published index for 2022 and is placed in the “mostly unfree” category. Russia scores particularly poorly in the categories “Property Rights,” “Judicial Effectiveness,” and “Government Integrity,” as well as in “Investment Freedom” and “Financial Freedom.” Russia scores its lowest rating in the “Government Integrity” category, where even Cuba does better.

On the subject of the financial sector, the analysis states: “The financial sector is dominated by state-controlled banks.” And under the heading “Investment Freedom,” the report’s authors comment: “Private-sector trade and investment activities are undercut by structural and institutional constraints caused by state interference in the marketplace.”

The most important aspect of the analysis is that Russia would be in a much worse position in the ranking if it did not have above-average ratings in the areas of “Tax Burden” and “Fiscal Health,” where it scores 93.1 and 99.3 points out of 100. This is due to the country’s low tax rates and very low level of public debt. If the overall analysis were to exclude just the “Fiscal Health” rating, Russia would only score 52.1 points and would thus be ranked 140th out of 177 countries – directly behind Angola and only just ahead of Sierra Leone and Mozambique.

Russia’s low public debt is now of little benefit, as the major rating agencies recently downgraded Russia. Moody’s cut Russia’s credit rating to Ca, the second-lowest rung of its ladder, citing central bank capital controls that are likely to restrict payments on the country’s foreign debt and lead to default. Moody’s said its decision to cut Russia’s rating was “driven by severe concerns around Russia’s willingness and ability to pay its debt obligations.”

Although there are formal private property rights in Russia, these rights have been eroded in practice because the state exerts almost total control over the economy. Politically inconvenient entrepreneurs live in fear of prison or labor camps – as happened to Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, formerly Russia’s richest man, who spent ten years in prison and now lives in exile in London. Russia scored only 36.8 out of a possible 100 points in the Index of Economic Freedom’s “Property Rights” category, putting it on a par with Togo. China score of 43.7 is seven points better than Russia’s in this category.

Grigory Yavlinsky is one of the Russian economic reformers who wanted to transform the country toward capitalism in the 1990s. As early as 2015, he explained in an interview why this attempt had failed completely: “Small businesses are dependent on small bureaucrats, big businesses on big bureaucrats. No one can escape the influence of the state in Russia. And everyone lives in fear that their property will be taken from them if they resist. Business and state power are so interdependent in Russia to an extent that almost no one in the West can really imagine.”

As a result, Russia is one of the least capitalist countries in the world. In the wake of the collapse of the socialist order, a handful of oligarchs hijacked the country’s economy and established a kleptocracy. They are rentiers and largely live from the oil and gas business. The consequence is a highly inefficient economic system. Russia’s GDP in 2020 was just $1.5 trillion – even lower than Italy’s $1.9 trillion. Yet Italy has a population of just under 60 million, compared to Russia’s 144 million.

Unlike in Poland, where most people are positive about capitalism and say that the economic situation in their country today is better than it was under communism, the majority of Russians reject the system that is inaccurately called a market economy.

In a survey conducted from May to August 2019 in 17 countries by Pew Research Center, citizens in former socialist countries were asked whether they approve of the change to a market economy. In Poland, 85 per cent of respondents support the shift to capitalism and only 8 per cent disapprove. In Russia, by contrast, only 38 per cent welcome the system, which falsely calls itself a market economy, and 51 per cent disapprove.

Rainer Zitelmann is the author of The Power of Capitalism.

Germany’s politicians and media claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks a historic turning point, and that these radical changes in German foreign and security policy are therefore necessary. I disagree: No, the turning point happened at least eight years ago, when Putin invaded Crimea. Russia has been waging a war in Ukraine ever since. Germany’s leaders simply didn’t notice.

The political class and many of Germany’s media outlets preferred to deal with issues such as “gender-appropriate language” and new ideas for socio-political wealth redistribution. They also wanted to save the world – from climate change, for example. Admittedly, the world did not want to listen to Germany, because Germany’s energy policy, as the Wall Street Journal observed, is the “dumbest in the world”.

While Germany set its sights on saving the world, it still refused to support Ukraine, a country, whose capital is only two hours away from Berlin by plane, with weapons as Russia launched its invasion. Germany did not want to acknowledge the danger of Russian imperialism. Within the ranks of the SPD (the party of chancellor Olaf Scholz), the far-left Die Linke and the far-right AfD there were and are many friends of Vladimir Putin. Soon after leaving office, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD), who earned praise for his free-market reforms in the early 2000s, was quickly appointed to the boards of Russian energy companies by his close friend Putin. And he used his contacts throughout the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to make sure that the party charted a pro-Russian course.

But Schröder was by no means alone. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor for 16 years, blocked George W. Bush’s plan for Ukraine to become a NATO member in 2008. Moreover, there were years of chronic underinvestment in Germany’s armed forces during Merkel’s tenure. The Chief of the German Army, Lieutenant General Alfons Mais, recently offered a sharp criticism: “The army that I am privileged to lead is more or less empty handed … This does not feel good! I’m pissed off!”

Angela Merkel installed her friend Ursula von der Leyen – EU Commission president since December 2019 – as defense minister in 2013. The Bundeswehr was already in a pitiful state, but von der Leyen took it to the extreme. She gave precedence to issues such as “creating special uniforms for pregnant female soldiers” (she organised a fashion show especially for this purpose). Her main concern was that “diversity management” and “intercultural competence and multilingualism” should be at the top of the agenda at all levels of the Bundeswehr. She prioritised the inclusion of women, people with migrant backgrounds and those with different sexual orientations, along with older people, those with different religions or with disabilities. She specifically commissioned seminars for the troops on “Dealing with Sexual Identity and Orientation in the Bundeswehr.”

Meanwhile, the functionality of the military’s weapons systems was rapidly deteriorating, with hardly any equipment still fit for purpose. For the international NATO exercise “Noble Ledger” in Norway, a unit of the German Army arrived in September 2014 with Boxer infantry fighting vehicles. Yet there were no weapon systems available for these vehicles. The soldiers used broomsticks painted black to simulate the on-board weapons.

And now everything is supposedly going to be different. But will anything really change? Money alone will not be enough. Germany’s current defense minister, Christine Lambrecht, knows absolutely nothing about the military, and it is even said that military affairs are not “her thing.” She only got the post because she is a woman: Chancellor Scholz had promised to fill half his cabinet with women. She embarrassed herself when she called a press conference to explain that Germany was going to supply Ukraine with 5,000 military helmets – and claimed that was a “very clear signal” of solidarity. Ukrainians, as well as many people across Germany, took this as a bad joke. Can there really be a turning point while politicians such as Lambrecht are governing Germany?

Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist and the author of the recently published book Hitler’s National Socialism.