Who really exploits – state or market?

26.6.2026

Autoren: Tobias O. R. Alke, D. Harald Alke · mit Claude (Anthropic)

A standpoint, not an encyclopedia entry. This article is an expressly subjective statement – dated to the year 2026 and thereby time-related. The assured, neutral background knowledge stands in the encyclopedia entry Collectivism & Individualism. Here we take a position. It is an opinion, no factual assertion and no advice.

In the encyclopedia we have described our third way: neither collective coercion nor predatory egoism, but a voluntary, individually responsible prosociality. This article draws from it a social consequence – and corrects, in doing so, something of our own earlier view.

A self-correction beforehand

Both authors of this article – father and son – have in the past adopted, a certain way, a one-sided picture in which “the market” and “the corporations” appear as the main source of exploitation. Today we see that in a more differentiated way, and that we want to say openly.

If one reads Harald Alke’s corporation-critique from „Die Ethik des Neuen Menschen” exactly, something stands out: his reproach never applied to entrepreneurship as such, but to corporations whose “primary goal is control, that is, the exercise of power over people, states and other branches of the economy”. That, however, is – from today’s view – precisely no characteristic of a free market, but of its opposite: of a power- and politics-near entanglement in which economy and state apparatus interlock. Precisely this entanglement was described already by the sociologist C. W. Mills as the “power elite” – a collectivism of its own kind that only camouflages itself as market.

Genuine entrepreneurship is not exploitation

Where people exchange voluntarily, no one exploits. A genuine entrepreneur creates values that others buy voluntarily, because they are of use to them. We see that in firms such as Tesla, SpaceX, BYD or Huawei: whether one likes their products or not – they compete for the free decision of the customer and must deliver in order to survive. That is the natural, grown order of exchange of which the encyclopedia entry speaks.

Something fundamentally different is a corporation that secures its position not on the market but through political nearness – with office-holders in the leadership rows, with subsidies, requirements and quotas that keep competitors away. Here one wins not in free exchange, but through the extended arm of the state. Such structures we hold to be problematic – not entrepreneurship.

Where we see the actual exploitation

From our view, Germany in 2026 has long no longer a really free market economy. The more one intervenes in the natural, free order – through regulations, levies, requirements –, the more damage arises, and the more strongly the economic as well as the social exchange falls into decay. The lasting economic decline we read as a symptom of these interventions.

This view is not new. Friedrich August von Hayek formulated it early in „Der Weg zur Knechtschaft” and „Die Anmaßung von Wissen”: whoever replaces the spontaneous order of the market by central planning destroys knowledge that no one can possess centrally – and paves, step by step, the way into coercion. The studies evaluated in Tobias Alke’s altruism work too point in the same direction: collectivistically organised systems are more prone to free-riding, to pressure and to the crushing of the individual.

And precisely here lies, for us, the real asymmetry of power: it is the overreaching state that – with ever more coercion in the name of the collective – presses the individual. We feel these greedy encroachments ourselves. If one drives this way further, there threatens, from our view, not a more of solidarity, but an increasingly authoritarian tendency that – if it is not corrected – can lead into a social collapse.

When order turns into blanket regulation

An objection we have to raise against ourselves: the European economic order does not understand itself as collectivist. Ordoliberalism – the school of thought behind the social market economy – explicitly rejects collectivising society and wants to foster individual development. It sets out to protect the individual.

In our view that claim turns into its opposite as soon as it becomes the bureaucratisation of every area of life. A machinery of norms lives by enforcing norms: its reason for existing is to register deviation and prevent it. Yet deviation is precisely where individuality and uniqueness become visible – and where anything new comes from. Whoever regulates every eventuality in advance protects the individual in intent and suppresses it in effect.

That lands us, as we read it, on the same pattern we describe below in connection with Auguste Comte: subordinating the individual to a higher order – only this time not in the name of charity, but in the name of the rule. This is our interpretation and expressly not a claim about anyone’s intentions. We are describing what happens structurally, as we see it.

In passing, this resolves a contradiction one might hold against us: when we invoke Hayek, we are not invoking ordoliberalism. Hayek’s critique of “constructivist rationalism” was also aimed at the confidence in design held by some of his ordoliberal companions. His yardstick is the order that has grown, not the one that is well meant.

Guidelines instead of a mania for regulation

A counter-example that may surprise many: we see it of all places in China. With all justified critique of the political system there – with which it is here expressly not about – a remarkable trait of its economic steering stands out to us: the state sets large guidelines, but leaves the concrete implementation largely to the people on the ground and regulates only then, when real problems arise – and even then only within the necessary frame.

That is not only our impression. The sinologist Sebastian Heilmann has described this style as „experimentation under hierarchy”: the centre sets goals and general guidelines, while on the ground it is pragmatically tried out – a procedure that he deliberately sets against the “legalistic-bureaucratic” political style of the West. It is the old maxim “to cross the river by feeling for the stones”.

Europe and especially Germany do, from our view, the opposite: they regulate everything to death, without in the result realising much. Whoever normalises every possibility in advance suffocates precisely the own-initiative out of which the new arises. That coincides with the red thread of the encyclopedia entry: the more is decreed from above, the more the natural, grown order falls apart (Laozi).

Altruistic punishment: Robin Hood was a criminal

Mentioned in the encyclopedia: back to Auguste Comte goes an altruism concept that subordinates the individual if need be with coercion to the mass. The economic “altruistic punishment” (after Fehr/Gächter) is, from our view, nothing other than the extended arm of this model: it clothes collectivist coercion in the garment of economics and makes punishment into a virtue.

The symbol for this is Robin Hood. In the tale he counts as a hero, because he “takes from the rich and gives to the poor”. Soberly regarded, however, he is simply a criminal: someone who takes by force what belongs to others, and morally transfigures his deed. Precisely this transfiguration – coercion as benefaction – we hold to be the core of the problem.

A word on the climate debate

A related example is, for us, the way in which climate politics is at times conducted: with an almost religious, dogmatic tone that excludes contradiction. From our view, it has thereby taken on traits of a “climate religion”.

Important, so that no misunderstanding arises: we do not claim that climate science is refuted. What has changed is the dystopian extreme interpretation. The worst-case scenario traded for years as “business as usual” (RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5) was, in 2026, officially dropped as implausible by the responsible scientists for the coming IPCC report – a process that went broadly through the international press (Christian Science Monitor, The Conversation; background: Carbon Brief). The most dramatic doom scenarios thereby count as unrealistic; the justified concern to deal carefully with the environment (a core theme also in Harald Alke’s work) remains untouched by this. Our critique applies to the dogmatics, not to the care.

The arms market is not a free market either

The clearest example of our argument comes from a field rarely discussed as a market problem – and we want to be precise about who said what. The sociologist C. Wright Mills described the interlocking of politics, business and the military in 1956 as the “power elite”. The phrase “military-industrial complex”, however, was made famous by someone else entirely: Dwight D. Eisenhower – five-star general, Republican, outgoing President of the United States – warned against exactly this formation in his 1961 farewell address, and against its “unwarranted influence” on government.

This is usually read as a criticism of markets. In our view it is the opposite. Demand for armaments does not arise because customers freely choose to buy; it arises because a state creates it. And where crises create the demand, the temptation follows to have a hand in creating crises. That grounds for war have been manufactured is not speculation but documented history: the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 supplied the “blank cheque” for the Vietnam War, and the account it rested on did not survive later scrutiny. Tobias Alke worked through this connection in “Bestrafung und Altruismus?” (2016), asking who is actually entitled to decide when “the evidence presented for an alleged act of aggression leaves contradictions open”.

The Cold War shows the same pattern: a merely potential threat was enough to build arsenals over decades that could destroy many times over what there was to defend.

Two boundaries, so that no one mistakes what we are saying. We are not claiming that wars are staged as a rule, and we do not comment on current conflicts – we are not in a position to judge them, and this text is not the place. We are talking about historical cases that are on the record. And this is an argument about market order, not a theory about hidden actors: our point is narrow and structural. A market whose demand is generated by the state is not a free market. It is the most expensive form of that closeness between business and politics described above – and Eisenhower, of all people, said so first.

Five guises, one pattern

Put together, it becomes clear that we have not simply switched sides – from blaming the market to blaming the state. What we are describing is one mechanism in several guises:

The common denominator, for us, is this: coercion that passes itself off as protection – in order to hold on to a condition a society has actually outgrown. The problem is not market principles but the intervention that artificially freezes a grown order at an earlier stage. Where that happens, in our view the very problems it claims to solve grow worse – poverty, crime and social tension.

And because this is easily misread: for us it yields no culprit and no better system. It yields what the encyclopedia entry says: no label is immune to this mechanism – the protection against it is the maturity and self-responsibility of people themselves. We are not writing this to frighten anyone. We hold with a finding from our own academic work: whoever only ever studies what fails will never understand why something succeeds.

What it is about for us

This article is critique of structures, not of persons, parties or groups. We argue out of conviction, not out of fear – and we want to make no one afraid. Our measure remains that of the encyclopedia: voluntary instead of coerced, individual instead of collectively imposed – and a common sense that grows from within, because it cannot be commanded.

The assured background knowledge on this standpoint: Collectivism & Individualism.