Germany suffocating under 'welfare extravaganza'

     To the editor:
      Is there some element in human nature that refuses to acknowledge that economic freedom is a blessing? If so, the nation of Germany seems to possess this element with abundance. With skyrocketing unemployment, the highest labor costs in the world, industrial growth reduced almost to zero, and big-name companies fleeing the country, the once-rich Germany is stagnating under the weight of a modern-day social welfare extravaganza. Yet Germans are scornfully rejecting the merest whiff of the only possible salvation -- a free market.
      What a society demands is eventually what it gets. What the German people are getting are the fruits of an idea called "social progress," which is obtained through "social justice." The costly benefits and privileges for labor are the "progress," while the extraction of wealth from business and industry is the "justice."
      In the face of the rapid rise of unemployment, now at 12.3 percent of the labor force, Germans still defiantly cling to irrational and discredited notions smacking of Marxism, defending them as being well worth the appalling costs.
      European financial ministers are creating conditions that are so bad that the European Bank and common currency can be sold as the only possible salvation from pending anarchy.
      Needless to say, the same fundamentals, with varying tactics, are in place for a similar scenario to develop in the United States at the proper time. Explosive government intervention in the economy has caused our markets to become less free and our property to be less secure. The result has been inevitable. By the best measure of economic progress -- worker productivity -- the United States is now performing below the average of the past two centuries.
      U.S. economic planners may be laying the same groundwork for an extensive and lengthy fiscal and social disaster similar to the German disease, just in time to bring on the world currency to "save" us in the year 2000. Time -- and the response of the American people to the encroaching financial tyranny -- will tell.
     JAMES BOYER
     Las Vegas