Capitalist Manifesto

Un artículo un poco antiguo, pero muy interesante. Sobre todo porque lo que describe, creo que lo estamos viendo en España bastante bien. Y no sólo aquí o en Alemania, sino en toda Europa. En Londres pude conocer a una chica perteneciente a un Think Tank liberal holandés que intentaba convencer a empresas para que invertiesen en apoyar el Libre Mercado, que sería positivo para todo el mundo. No me acuerdo del nombre del Think Tank, pero hablando con ella le sorprendió encontrarse con cada vez más gente que apoyaba el Libre comercio, y que conociesen a gente como Johan Norberg, o yendo más atrás a Milton Friedman, Hayek etc.. aunque sólo fuera de nombre y lo que proponían, no sus obras o ideas enteras.

Capitalist Manifesto:

Europe could use more people like Ehssan Dariani. The 26-year-old entrepreneur runs a hot Internet start-up called studiVZ—Europe's fastest-growing social network for university students. Since setting up in a cheap Berlin loft only last fall, he's already hired 25 people. Yet when Dariani looks back at his high-school days, a decade ago in the west German city of Kassel, he remembers his teachers warning against exactly what he's doing. "They taught us the market economy was a dangerous wilderness full of risk and bankruptcy," Dariani says. "We never learned how prices affect supply and demand, only about evil managers and unjust wages." If he'd listened to his teachers, he'd be among the vast majority of German students who dream of becoming civil servants or fitting into the comfortable hierarchy of a traditional corporation. Instead he set out and created some desperately needed jobs.

Ask any European what he learned at school about how the economy works, and you'll likely hear a similar story. A recent study of German high-school textbooks by the Institute for the German Economy, in Cologne, found entrepreneurs—instead of getting credit for creating jobs—taking the blame for everything from unemployment to alcoholism to Internet fraud and cell-phone addiction. Some high-school social-studies textbooks teach globalization as an unmitigated catastrophe; students are advised to consult the radical anti-globalization protest group Attac for further information. In France, books approved by the Education Ministry promote statist policies and voodoo economics. "Economic growth imposes a way of life that fosters stress, nervous depression, circulatory disease and even cancer," reports "20th-Century History," a popular high-school text published by Hatier. Another suggests Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were dangerous free-market extremists whose reforms plunged their countries into chaos and despair.

Seguid leyendo.