Can liberalism be dangerous?

The guiding goal of liberalism is freedom of the individual, primarily vis-à-vis the state. Every person is supposed to live as they want to, as long as they don’t violate the freedom of others.

I’m sure everyone can agree on that. But what happens when someone’s inheritance or abilities make them so economically powerful that others become dependent on them? What if they are only focused on maximizing the profit for their company and abuse their power?

This kind of behavior can lead to predatory capitalism (also called turbo-capitalism or ultra-liberalism).

Some economists have promoted the  f r e e  economy. But today most economists advocate a  s o c i a l  market economy.

How social should the market economy be? If an economy is only social, the driver for accomplishing great things is missing. In a free market economy, people’s selfish pursuits can contribute to the well-being of society as a whole.

When an economy is only “free", employees in non-privileged positions receive unfairly low wages. The economy has to be regulated so that everyone gets a fair share of the profits.

Unions can help defend the rights of wage earners. Unions are needed. Everyone needs to be able to defend themselves and assert their rights.

But when unions push wages up against the realities of the market through strikes, they use tools closer to cartels. Just as the formation of corporate cartels, fixing wages through cartels is poison for the economy.

Why are wages rising insufficiently in lower income brackets? If we assume that the principle of supply and demand also applies to wages, then we have to conclude that people with low-skilled jobs are forced to compete with workers from China because of globalization. The employees at a company producing vacuum cleaners can’t achieve higher wages through strikes, because the vacuum cleaners would be imported from China then. Unions have lost influence in the manufacturing sector.

Wages, and therefore the prices of products, are no longer rising and we have almost no inflation.

Employers can also bring in almost unlimited numbers of workers from low-wage countries. Tweaked “studies” by economists would have us believe that wages are no less likely to rise as a result of immigration. And many unions also accept these studies because they are committed to socialism, which wants to open borders to everyone.

There is an unholy alliance between representatives of the free market economy and trade unions influenced by socialism, which has the effect that the “supply” of workers with low qualifications is always large and wages do not rise by themselves.

Uncontrolled globalization benefits international corporations the most.

Organisms in nature consist of cells that are protected by cell walls. Each cell determines what is allowed to pass through the cell walls and what isn’t. Organisms do not consist of a fluid in which everything can move everywhere.

In the same way, all countries also need to determine to what extent they want to keep their borders open.

The social market economy needs carefully balanced laws. But everything can’t be regulated by laws. Companies and institutions have to have good reputations in society to survive. Blacklists can have a lot of influence here.

When companies indulge in predatory capitalism, they need to be pilloried by the political parties.

The social market economy can’t entirely prevent large wage differences. Income disparities have to be mitigated through taxes. Tax rates are progressive in most countries. However, tax progression has become skewed by inflation in almost all countries. Cold progression means that small and medium incomes are taxed too heavily and the top tax rate takes effect too early. The same is true for property taxes.

Dogmatic liberalism has the characteristics of an ideology and is harmful to society because it leads to injustice and promotes communism and dogmatic socialism.