[Skybird]

And on the Greens.

German version: https://austrian-institute.org/de/bl...nd-dirigismus/



The recent elections in various countries have shown that the issue of climate change can mobilize voters, especially young voters, and bring the Greens considerable success. Above all, climate policy has long since become a reservoir for fundamental criticism of society and capitalism, in which the central characteristics of the thinking and acting of the Greens become particularly clear.

The Greens describe themselves as the “most moral of all parties in Germany” - according to Boris Palmer, Lord Mayor of Tübingen and (still) party member of the Greens. Indeed, the Greens pursue a strongly moral policy based on clear (implicit or explicit) value judgments.

The Greens see the widespread “low” and “evil” attitudes of many people as the cause of the climate crisis. The world climate is destabilized because malicious and reckless people intentionally endanger the climate in order to pursue their selfish goals. This view creates a clear moral enemy image and allows the Greens to divide the world according to a good-evil scheme and to emphasize their own moral superiority over others. Because from the perspective of the Greens, good action is expressed solely through a good attitude and not through positive consequences of action. This ethical point of view releases the well-meaning people from informing themselves about the actual consequences of their own actions and from justifying them.The good intention alone legitimizes one's own actions, whether the actual purpose of the action is actually achieved is then largely irrelevant.

The political offer that the Greens are making to the voters is a morally caring state. This offer is particularly popular when social problems, crises or catastrophes are actually threatening or are being painted on the wall by politics and the media. A central political element of the Greens is therefore to first outline supposed social crises and threats and then offer state protection.

The Greens experience the legitimation of their actions primarily through the protection of the climate and the preservation of the earth itself. They see it as their highest obligation to do everything to protect the climate and to subordinate everything to this goal, since a climate catastrophe is imminent.

The politics and especially the climate policy of the Greens is strongly ideological, since climate protection is elevated to the all-important "question of human survival" and is made absolute as the highest and most important social goal to which all other goals have to be subordinate. The Greens are calling for a “climate-friendly economy” in which the wishes and needs of the people only play a subordinate role. Compromises with other social goals must and must not be made if the climate goal is made absolute. And of course all means and instruments are just and fair to achieve this goal - if necessary also the conscious violation of democratic and constitutional principles.

The ideological burden of green climate policy is also expressed in the fact that many of the measures proposed by the Greens do not contribute to a rational solution to the climate problem, but only serve to propagate their own worldview. After all, many energy and climate policy projects turn out to be pure wishful thinking and an illusion when confronted with the hard facts of economic and scientific reality. Climate protection as a mobilization strategy is therefore much more important for the Greens than asking about the efficiency and effectiveness of climate policy instruments. To quote Robert Habeck: "The climate crisis or the question of what means should be used to fight it is not only conducted as an economic debate, but also as a cultural one."

The Greens combine moral standards and ideological conviction with a pronounced constructivism and a tendency towards dirigism. They have very specific ideas about how which areas of society should function and which societal results are desired. The Greens think primarily in terms of bans and government regulations, with which they want to bring about what is politically desired immediately and as quickly as possible on numerous issues and in many areas of society. The Greens' ban and exit list is so long that their representatives have to try to belittle it. Katrin Göring-Eckardt does not speak of bans, but of “radical-realistic demands” and Robert Habeck immediately reinterprets the Greens as a “design party”.

This striving for "creation" is motivated by the understanding of justice and the idea of ​​mankind of the Greens. They criticize the distribution results of the market per se as unjust and unsocial and thus reject fairness of performance and fairness of rules as social principles. The Greens focus their gaze on the results and demand fair results or equal social equality. In doing so, however, they lose sight of the process of generating the results, i.e. the actual production process, which they are only marginally interested in. The fact that state intervention in the price mechanism inevitably leads to a shortage of supply, combined with queues and bureaucratic allocation, they generously ignore with reference to their lofty goals.

This direct focus on social outcomes gives the Greens a lot of leeway in a moral interpretation of market outcomes and their rejection. This is accompanied by an open or covert criticism of growth and capitalism. Climate policy is therefore seen by many as a suitable way of undermining private entrepreneurship and competition that has always been undesirable for other reasons.

It is not without reason that the election manifesto of the Greens reveals - according to the Federation of German Industry - a "pronounced dirigistic understanding of the state that aims to replace the principles of the social market economy with concepts of state control and redistribution with a very narrow perspective on a national goal of climate protection."

The multitude of bans, restrictions and technological requirements and the state micro-control in all areas of life, as demanded by the Greens, are elements of a different social order in which the state controls people's lives and economies - regardless of economic feasibility. The previous social market economy of Ludwig Erhard and Alfred Müller-Armack needs to be overcome through a "global socio-ecological transformation" - with the aim of aligning all economic activities with "overall social prosperity" (according to the Green Basic Program of 2020).

Such results can only be achieved, however, if the state intervenes massively in the competition and determines the competition result according to its ideas of fairness. Annalena Baerbock also admits: “We have to be radical and openly demand a system change.” And nothing is more suitable for this system change than climate policy, with which liberal and market-based principles can be overridden and a renaissance of state management ideas can be initiated. These tendencies can already be observed today; they will increase significantly in the course of the EU's Green Deal. We are well on the way to an ecologically and morally founded paternalistic society, the ecological dictatorship that many Greens long for.

The Greens do not want to fail shortly before their goal. That is why they forbid any criticism of the majority opinion in climate science and their basic moral positions. They are less interested in an open-ended discussion and in the search for the most suitable climate policy instruments than in a confirmation of their ideological ideas. The discrediting of critics as “climate deniers” is evidence of a less democratic understanding of society and a poorly open understanding of discourse.

Whether the Greens actually achieve their goal depends on the voters. As long as they continue to be satisfied with convictions and morals and demand inappropriate solutions, the Greens have no incentive to deviate from their ethical strategy. The voters - and the media public - must demand an open and unprejudiced discussion and value responsible and critical reason and judgment. Only in this way is there the prospect that an appropriate relationship between ethos and responsibility and between morality and reason will be restored in politics.