“The state’s dangerous lust for intervening in the economy”

Germany’s political system lately displays a questionable tendency towards prescribing the economy what to do by means of mandatory quotas, whether it is about the share of women in the management of companies or about the share of electric cars on the road, Ferdinand Knauß writes in a commentary for WirtschaftsWoche. “Critics from business and science who used to say that a quota curtails entrepreneurial freedom and the freedom of contract (…) have fallen silent,” Knauß argues. But Chancellor Angela Merkel had already become used to directing the economy with the energy transition, he says. “Quotas for the labour market or the product range of companies, however, no longer have anything in common with the ideas of the social market economy’s founding fathers, which were centred on individual freedom,” Knauß says.

Read the commentary in German here.