Foundations are booming in Germany and they are frequently cherished as the ideal way to harness private wealth for the common good.
I’m critical about the efficiency, equity and legitimacy of civil society, and I think foundations are a case in point. This tax-exempt, free-roaming and supposedly benevolent capital is subjected to only minimal public accountability and may sometimes reflect a troublingly elitist vision of the common good.
Bertelsmann Stiftung / AG Berlin, via Flickr, originally uploaded by Gertrud K.
Kommandantenhaus, Unter den Linden 1, 10117 Berlin: charity?
The duty that is both elegant, and fair. The regime that lets our economies grow, and have everyone partake in its fruits. The excise that reconciles efficiency with equity. The set of rules that raises the revenue for a potent polity, and, at the same time, curbs wasteful decadence, to form that more perfect union.
If you haven’t met the perfect tax, let me introduce you: the postpaid progressive consumption tax.
The secret of the perfect tax? It burdens that behavior which is truly wasteful and undesirable: excessive consumption. It leaves all other economic activities unaffected.
Together with a negative income-tax for poor income earners and, possibly, a wealth tax to avoid boundless capital accumulation, it can replace all other redistributive taxes, both on individuals and corporations. Read on for more.
This question recently came up in a discussion on new EU member state policy on poverty and social exclusion.
It’s not a simple question. And it depends an awful lot on what we accept as given.
In many discussions on EU enlargement and related social and tax policy reform, as in the broader context of liberalization, I think we too readily accept as inevitable a (mis)configuration of the international political economy which really is of our own choosing.
It occurs to me, in the current economic crisis, and in public debt-ridden times to come, more than ever, discussions on public policy conclude in a shoulder-shrugging realization that we knew what to do about it. If only, we could afford to.
I’m getting tired of this resignation, be it in fighting climate change, in improving public education, or in helping out the weak, at home, and abroad.
I want a strong polity that can do these things. I want more, not less government. A better state.
How do we get there? We do what we used to be able to do: we reclaim our responsibility to channel the resources to the goods we collectively value the most.
We redistribute. It’s not a dirty word. It doesn’t hurt growth. It’s not socialism.
I was recently tasked to prepare a presentation on the political economy questions of climate change: How expensive is saving the climate? And who should shoulder the costs?
As I prepared the presentation for Dr. Mildner’s “States & Markets” seminar, it occurred to me that to answer these questions, we first have to understand the risks and uncertainties of climate change. The real questions, I thought were then different ones:
How do we manage risk, and respond to uncertainty?
How do we treat extreme low probability and high consequence events?
How do we respond to asymmetric risks?
The more I learned about current risk modeling of the climatic and economic impacts of global warming, the more worried I became. I realized, that climate change (as, incidentally, lessons learned from the financial crisis), requires us to rethink how we manage systemic, interdependent, asymmetric and extreme risks as well as uncertainty.
I agree, we need to act now, and we need to ask strongly.
Yes, this video simplifies. Yes, it dramatizes. And Yes, it scares us.
And it should. For when everything is at stake, alarmism is not irrational, it becomes a moral imperative and different risk management is necessary. Continue reading →
