Thomas Geoghegan, Anwalt für Arbeitsrecht, hat das Buch “Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life”, verfasst und stellt im Interview dazu fest, das die USA sich einige Punkte der deutschen Sozialen Marktwirtschaft abschauen könnten. Er meint, wir leben hierzulande in einem “socialist idyll”, das sich beispielsweise durch sechs staatlich verordnete Urlaubswochen, kostenlose Universitäten, Pflegeversicherung und Kindergartenplätze auszeichnet.

But the Germans have a lower GDP than we do. Doesn’t that mean that our quality of life is better?

One day we’ll get beyond that and see that the European standard of living is rising. You can pull out these GDP per capita statistics and say that people in Mississippi are vastly wealthier than people in Frankfurt and Hamburg. That can’t be true.

Just spend two months in Hamburg and spend two months in Tupelo, Mississippi. There’s something wrong if the statistics are telling you that the people in Tupelo are three times wealthier than the people in Germany.

Despite the numbers, social democracy really does work and delivers the goods and it’s the only model that an advanced country can do to be competitive in this world. I mean that not just in terms of exports, but in terms of being green at the same time. That we can raise the standard of living without boiling the planet shows how our measure of GDP is so crude.

Den Rest des Interviews lesen…