BELLRAM

Mr Jens carefully placed his cup back on the saucer. The lower rim of the cup sank into the cold coffee. His look revealed that he was still resenting Claire's mistake.

"The reason that your public companies are profitable is in no part due to your management, but to the fact that you are prohibiting everyone else from foreign trade. The public companies make profits on the world market and use the money to keep up with the private sector at home. That is the whole answer to his question. The rest was unnecessary. You have low taxes, you say. But that has nothing to do with your good-heartedness. One only has to look at your tax law to quickly see how things really stand. The threshold for value-added tax is high. The corporate tax is progressive. The administrative burden on small businesses is low. All you care about is fostering small businesses and fleecing big ones. Small businesses are meant to be lucrative and should be able to grow up easily to compete with medium sized ones so that they don't continue to grow and start to compete with yours. You don't want big companies in the domestic market to protect your public companies. The reason that your public companies can make profits in the global market is also not because of how they are run. Baele is a strong business location by nature. The soil is good. There is enough water almost everywhere. There are important and rare raw materials in high quantity. Almost no one profits from it though, because the mountains, lakes and rivers of the country are mainly owned by your public companies. They were gifts from you. You gave them to them after having previously bought them from the old nobility, always at horrendous prices, always far above market value, just to outbid the private sector, usually also out of the state coffers. It's not as if you had always reached into your own pockets, even though they are quite ample. The most expensive of all and the biggest failure was the fernium mine in the north, which is almost exhausted, but that was only found out after you had already bought it. The damage is being borne by the taxpayer. Thanks to your openness, everyone can read how much you have sunk there. The mine would not have been profitable for another 24 years. Now it hasn't lasted quite that long. All of this just so that you can pose as genius entrepreneurs abroad, whereupon you are then always rightfully laughed at. That your public companies are turning a profit with this amount of preferential treatment is not impressive. I guarantee you that when the ore in the north is exhausted in the next few years, the first of your public companies will fall to its knees, then everything from the metal industry that loses its supplier, and then you can explain to the boy again why you are successful."

"Once the ore runs out.... You misjudge me. It is true that I do not want competition, but who does? If I couldn't keep the others down so easily through legislation, I would be forced to eat them up or drive them out of the market like everyone else does. It's more convenient this way, is it not? Our tax law is also about keeping bureaucracy to a minimum. For example, if you want to open a business, you can usually just do it without having to register it beforehand. It's nonsense to control every little thing, because once again everyone else forgets that it's all connected. The expenses that all the authorities cause the state by processing all these files are not the expenses that all these files, cause the state. In the end, the state also pays for the creation of these files. Money is infinite. Time is the limited good and I prefer to invest wisely. As for Schwarzberg, they won't close, but a lot of the jobs will be cut. That has already been decided. It's just hasn't been announced yet. What can be done? There just wasn't as much ore as expected. These things happen. I am responsible for this, which is why the files are open to public, as it is the case with many things that I decide. It has nothing to do with me feeling guilty, if that's what you think. I can't sink any money either. After all, the money is not gone. It comes back into my coffers on its own through taxes. The Schwarzberg staff will be informed at the end of the year, then the layoffs will take place. The rest will be settled with mining licences. If you're interested, you can make an offer to Schwarzberg. They'll handle it themselves. As for the chain that is attached to them, they can of course still make profits with a different supplier without any problems. The success of the state companies also has nothing to do with the fact that I ban everyone else from foreign trade. I am not banning anyone from foreign trade. If anything, one could say that Baele restricts the export and import of certain goods under certain conditions. Every other country does that as well, it's only different goods and different conditions. Every domestic company has free access to the world market as long as it follows the general regulations and meets the requirements of the Disaster Protection Act."

"You can't seriously be saying that. Just as an example, the import of grain is completely banned if you don't have a contract with one of your public companies or if you are not otherwise approved by you. The export of grain is also completely banned if you are not a public company or if you have not stored around a whole year's harvest. Nobody does that. It's not economical. You would rather set up a second location abroad and produce and sell there, provided that you can afford the investment. That is not free trade. This is pretended protectionism to oppress the private sector."

"That has nothing to do with oppression. If a foreign company wants to import to us, then it needs a permission. We have certain qualitative requirements that have to be met. I don't want cheap foreign goods flooding our market. If a company submits an application and we find out that no reasonable wages are paid or that the working conditions are not sufficiently fulfilled, then there is no permission. We don't want to support that. We are not desperatlly in need. If you want to be in our market, you have to meet our standards. If you can't do that, then there is no trade."

"How many companies got a permission last year?"

"Few, but there were hardly any applications either."

"Why do they think there were hardly any?"

"Unless you offer luxury items or exotic goods, it's not worth the cost to import to us. You'd rather come here with your money and do everything here."

"You close your country off because you are afraid of the competition. That is the only reason. The Disaster Protection Act is also only there for that. In my eyes, that's still the biggest joke of them all, to claim that that is necessary. Like everyone else in the world, I have seen the pictures of the hundreds of tons of food that are thrown away every year."

"And as always, it's the same pictures that everyone has seen. They're all from the first years. Do you really think that after almost two decades the companies still haven't figured it out how to maintain a stock. With the grain, of course, you also took what has the highest requirements. But to stay with the example, the oldest part is processed into animal food and re-stocked from the new harvest. It is also a gross simplification to describe the required quantity as a one-year harvest. Of course there are upper limits. The only thing that bothers companies is that they have to keep a stock at all and that's the only reason it's criticised."

"You can sugarcoat it all you want. It just sounds like excuses to me."