Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-06-12-Speech-3-046-000"
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"en.20130612.3.3-046-000"2
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"Mr President, if we are serious about growth, there are two things we can do. First of all, we could ensure that the free market is actually free, and secondly we could challenge the attitude in our companies’ boardrooms which thinks that you can socialise debt and privatise profits. I am afraid that both of those issues still need some attention.
The supposedly free economic system has been anything but free. It has been manipulated and abused. The same man who carried out the inquiry into the crisis in the United States gave evidence to Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs. He stated that, when some senior businesspeople went to their bosses in America and said that they could not justify their actions in taking these bonuses and that the whole thing was almost, if not downright, criminal, they were told, ‘IWBH, YWBH – I won’t be here, you won’t be here’.
We had thought we had changed that attitude with the regulations that we have passed. I do not think it has changed. It would serve Europe well if the Commission spent a considerable amount of its time trying to re-educate people in the boardrooms of Europe to help them understand that the businesses they are in are legitimate and profit-making, but that they can also incur losses. An OECD report from 2011 shows how the level of inequality in the 22 member nations it studied increased by 10% since the mid-1980s, with conditions deteriorating in 17 of them.
However, it is important to note that no other economic system in history has generated as much wealth and progress as capitalism. Global GDP increased by a factor of seven over the first 1800 years of the Common Era, and since then has multiplied 70 times, indicating that the capitalist social market economy can bring extraordinary benefits for the common good. But it must be free of state dictatorship and free of manipulation. That requires good and balanced regulation."@en1
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