Democracy is no command economy

“Who dares contradicting me is an evil person. Who does not go along with me, Minister of Finance, ought to be ashamed - a remarkable process.”

by Dr Alexander Kissler

The tone is getting rougher: Politicians such as Norbert Lammert or Wolfgang Schäuble have complained vociferously about criticism of the government. It is based on a severe misunderstanding.
Democracy is a great thing – if only there weren’t the people who are defiant and rebellious, and refuse to keep quiet: This view is becoming more and more endemic these days. At increasingly short intervals, politicians are losing self control. They always seem to feel misunderstood, ill-advised, and mistakenly hauled over the coals. Currently Norbert Lammert and Wolfgang Schäuble are in the front row.
The Federal Minister of Finance has been awarded the “International Charlemagne Prize of the City of Aachen 2012” as “creative mind and important player in almost all integration issues in the past three decades,” he is thus the successor of the euro itself, which bizzarely enough, was also honored with the “Internatio-nal Charlemagne Prize” in 2002. This odd honor did however not prevent Schäuble from knocking out the citizen and financial expert Thilo Sarrazin. Schäuble pinpointed nothing but “blatant nonsense” and even “despicable calculation” in Sarrazin’s criticism of the single currency theses. Quasi officially it was stated: Who dares contradicting me is an evil person. Who does not go along with me, Minister of Finance, ought to be ashamed – a remarkable process.

Deviating from government doctrine not allowed?

Hardly any friendlier, Schäuble, holder of a doctorate of law, has dealt with almost 200 German professors of economics. They had dared to warn very clearly against an European Union-wide liability for banks, stating that the banks' debts were three times higher than the national debts, and that it was in fact fundamentally wrong to abolish the insolvency
risk for the banks, “banks must be allowed to fail.” Schäuble retaliated that such scaremongering with “horror stories” was outrageous and irresponsible. The aim of the EU measures was not “to communitise  responsibility, but to create a common supervision in Europe.” Are we to believe this?
Should, in this case, declarations of intent, targets and protective measures be binding, whereas in the past they melted away as quickly as ice cream in the sun? When professors, who are otherwise alleged for their unworldliness in the academic ivory tower, leave their coverage and make use of their civil civic
mandate, which is, like the water for the fish, essential for the people in a republic – they are insulted by a leading member of the government! Can someone who submits a position in public deviating from the government's doctrine, really be held responsible?
Interesting indeed! Bundestag President Norbert Lammert is not immune against such impulses either. The second man nominally in the state operates habitually as if the fading term of the Better Westerner had been invented just for him. The man from Bochum likes to display his erudition, his rhetorical delicacy and his broad education. He just knows it all. He has even retranslated the Lord’s Prayer, the old one was possibly suboptimal.

Not just a specialty of the CDU/CSU

Norbert Lammert, Ph.D. sociologist took the entire academic intelligence to task. “The experts” had proven “not to be helpful” in the past: “Of all the possible methods to resolve this crisis in recent months the least suitable was the implementation of recommendations of experts.” Your Grace, Lord President of the Bundestag: The responsibility is still in the hands of the politicians who decide in the end . Politicians who follow wrong advice are completely responsible for it. A purely technical “implementation of recommendations of experts” has nothing to do with democracy. Some may give advice, the others must decide for the benefit and on behalf of the people. Like this, and only in this way, a republic is formed. Thus it would be more honest to say that all the wrong decisions in the past few months had been taken by politicians who did not know better.
Of course, the howling against the sovereign (which is understandable from a human point of view) is no specialty of the CDU. The following sentence of former Federal Interior Minister Otto Schily (SPD), at the end of 2002, has become legendary; he labelled “exaggerated criticism” of the federal government as     “anti-democratic.”
In other words: Those who don’t criticize the executive – which theoretically only ought to execute and not to decide – renounce their primordial democratic right. Each and every action of the government needs to pass the fire of public criticism. Those who cannot stake this might better look around for other forms of government. In Neuschwanstein Castle there are some vacancies.     •

Source: “Kissler's Konter”, 12/07/2012, in Focus.de, see also: www.alexander-Kissler.de, courtesy of the author.
www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/kisslers-konter/kritik-in-zeiten-der-krise-demokratie-ist-keine-kommandowirtschaft_aid_780984.html