It took some cy­cling around in Al­tona to find the Fabrik, un­til a bunch of peo­ple with firearms made clear where it was go­ing down. They were hang­ing around the artists' en­trance and on the cor­ner a bit fur­ther down the street was the main en­trance of the Fabrik. Fabrik is like an in­dus­tri­al ver­sion of Par­adiso, but small­er. I ar­rived around sev­en, and it was al­ready pret­ty full.

If you're not SPD, you weren't sup­posed to be there. If Scholz looks into the au­di­ence and then con­cludes he can see there is no­body there who will ben­e­fit from the FDP tax plans, he seems con­fi­dent no­body would be in­sult­ed by that. How wrong he is. But while walk­ing out of there in the first five min­utes would be a nice state­ment, I doubt some­one there would have the in­tel­li­gence to get the mes­sage.

Wow­ere­it's talk was in that same an­noy­ing style Stein­meier has. That style is OK if you're sud­den­ly stand­ing out­side on a tank in the rain try­ing to mo­ti­vate some peo­ple to fight the rev­o­lu­tion, but in­side with a pro­fes­sion­al au­dio set­up there are more cap­ti­vat­ing ways to tell a sto­ry. And the style pro­ject­ing this whole urge to fi­nal­ly do some­thing is a bit mis­placed if you're rep­re­sent­ing a po­lit­i­cal par­ty that is cur­rent­ly part of the crew run­ning the coun­try.

A par­ty that ig­nores a pe­ti­tion with over 130k sup­port­ers and then talks about cam­paign­ing based on ar­gu­ments is hard­ly be­liev­able. The au­di­ence and it's re­ac­tions make clear the SPD can still rely on plen­ty of ig­no­rant fol­low­ers who are not in­ter­est­ed in ar­gu­ments. They are more like "Show me the mon­ey!"

Scholz men­tioned like a cheap pop­ulist that ac­cord­ing to the FDP tax plan Dr. Josef Ack­er­mann would get a tax break of over a mil­lion eu­ros. Some left­ies pulled that same stunt in The Nether­lands. Try­ing to tax some rich guys to get some ex­tra mon­ey, but then those rich guys quick­ly moved abroad and are no longer pay­ing any tax­es in The Nether­lands. In the end that lost the coun­try about ten times the amount they want­ed to tax them. So how much are those ap­plaud­ing in the au­di­ence will­ing to pay to try to deny Ack­er­mann an ex­tra mil­lion?

What's to­tal­ly miss­ing in the SPD way of see­ing things is where the reach of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment ends. They are all hap­py plan­ning their so­cial­ist state and fail to see that if they push to hard the mon­ey dis­ap­pears over the bor­der or into the un­der­ground econ­o­my. But deep down they prob­a­bly re­mem­ber the DDR where the reach of the gov­ern­ment didn't end, and that's what they'll prob­a­bly stum­ble into with all their good in­ten­tions. They are go­ing all provin­cial about jobs, more con­cerned about shift­ing them be­tween parts of Ger­many than be­ing aware those jobs could end up in Rus­sia or Chi­na.

Be­cause the Ber­lin sub­way was go­ing to be pri­va­tized the op­er­a­tors post­poned main­te­nance to cut costs and pre­tend to be more prof­itable, and thus of a faked high­er val­ue, and that lead to shut­ting down large parts of the ser­vice when the au­thor­i­ties found out the trains failed to com­ply with safe­ty stan­dards be­cause of that. Scholz then doesn't con­clude there is some­one in charge of the gov­ern­ment owned sub­way that has fucked this up, but man­ages to blame ethics in pri­vate en­ter­pris­es for it. And he looked like he be­lieved it him­self.

SPD fails to no­tice how their good in­ten­tions will be abused. The eas­i­est way to make a load of mon­ey is to have so­cial­ists give tax-pay­ers' mon­ey to you. The cur­rent fi­nan­cial cri­sis was trig­gered by de­moc­rats in the states that want­ed some­thing like to force the val­ue of loans to be the same and not de­pend­ing on the so­cial back­ground of the per­son get­ting the loan. Those in­ten­tions are good, but if in the real world for ex­am­ple the chance of a black per­son los­ing his job could be just a bit high­er than a white per­son los­ing his job, and that will be re­flect­ed in the risk in­volv­ing the loan, and in­flu­ence it's val­ue. I'm not say­ing it's a good thing those dif­fer­ences ex­ist in the first place, but if po­lit­i­cal cor­rect­ness forces the econ­o­my to ig­nore them while every­body knows in the real world they are there, soon­er or lat­er there will be a very nasty cor­rec­tion, and some peo­ple will get very rich lever­ag­ing that sit­u­a­tion. And it's clear the SPD is full of good in­ten­tions to make a lot of so­cial laws, but they don't have the com­pe­tence to see how those same laws give peo­ple smarter than them an op­por­tu­ni­ty to screw over the peo­ple they are try­ing to help. Whether it's the Hartz-Ⅳ moth­er who has to give the mon­ey back her daugh­ter has earned to buy a gui­tar, or the peo­ple con­struct­ing gen­er­al agree­ments to ar­ti­fi­cial­ly set min­i­mum wages to € 3.80, wasn't any­one in­volved in cre­at­ing those laws smart enough to fig­ure out how that was bound to hap­pen?

And try­ing to ban the NPD, does a com­pet­ing po­lit­i­cal par­ty re­al­ly need to go into that dirty busi­ness to at­tract vot­ers? How hard is it to see that like the ex­is­tence of € 3.80 wages, the ex­is­tence of a pop­u­lar NPD is a symp­tom of a prob­lem that needs to be tak­en care of and try­ing to just erase the symp­toms doesn't solve any­thing?

Al­most every­thing Scholz and Wow­ere­it said had these kinds of flawed log­ic and lim­it­ed con­text, but it seemed to be suf­fi­cient for most of the au­di­ence to vote SPD any­way. Maybe a lot of the smarter ones in the area were at the oth­er meet­ing tonight.