When money no longer decides who gets to feel safe

I keep coming back to a fairly simple question:

How do we build a society in which money can remain useful without allowing it to determine who gets to live securely?

I don’t think abolishing markets or money is the answer. Money is an extraordinarily useful coordination mechanism. It allows millions of people who don’t know each other to exchange work, resources and ideas.

The problem begins somewhere else: when money stops being a tool for coordinating economic activity and becomes a prerequisite for dignity, security and political influence.

A foundation that isn’t for sale

I think we should distinguish much more clearly between two kinds of things.

There are things we want. And there are things we fundamentally need.

Food, basic housing, healthcare, water, energy, education and some degree of economic security belong to the latter category.

Markets can participate in providing all of these. But access to their essential minimum shouldn’t disappear because someone temporarily lacks purchasing power.

That changes the role of the welfare state in my mind. It isn’t primarily a mechanism for redistributing money from successful people to unsuccessful people.

It is social infrastructure.

Just as a power grid prevents every household from having to produce its own electricity, social infrastructure prevents every individual crisis from becoming an existential crisis.

And that has consequences far beyond poverty.

A person who knows that unemployment won’t mean losing healthcare, housing and the ability to feed their family can make different decisions. They can reject abusive employment. Retrain. Start a company. Leave a destructive relationship. Take risks.

Security can therefore produce freedom rather than undermine it.

Germany already contains part of this idea

Germany and Europe aren’t starting from zero.

Public education, statutory health insurance, unemployment insurance, pensions, social assistance and large parts of public infrastructure already establish an important principle:

Not everything in life is allocated according to purchasing power.

The social market economy itself was built around the idea that markets need institutions around them.

But I think some of that balance has become fragile.

Housing is perhaps the clearest example.

A home is simultaneously a place to live, an investment, collateral, an inheritance and an asset class. Those functions don’t always point in the same direction.

If housing becomes increasingly attractive as a financial asset while affordable supply remains scarce, something essential slowly moves from the societal foundation into the competition for capital.

And that is where I think we should be careful.

The problem isn’t wealth. It’s when wealth becomes control.

I don’t think someone becoming wealthy is inherently a societal problem.

People should be able to build companies, invent things, invest, save, take risks and enjoy the rewards of successful work.

The more interesting question is what accumulated wealth can eventually control.

Can it control access to housing?

Can it buy dominant market positions?

Can it disproportionately shape legislation?

Can it control important information channels?

Can wealth reproduce itself across generations so effectively that economic competition slowly becomes competition between inherited starting positions?

At that point we’re no longer merely talking about differences in consumption.

We’re talking about power.

That’s why competition law, inheritance and capital taxation, transparency around lobbying, media plurality and strong public institutions aren’t separate issues to me. They are different mechanisms for maintaining the same boundary:

Economic success should not automatically become societal sovereignty.

Resilience instead of maximum efficiency

There’s another lesson I think Europe has been learning rather painfully.

The cheapest system isn’t necessarily the strongest system.

For decades we’ve optimized supply chains, energy systems and production around efficiency. That can create enormous prosperity. But a system without redundancy can become surprisingly fragile.

One geopolitical conflict, pandemic, drought, cyberattack or blocked trade route can suddenly transform an efficient dependency into a strategic vulnerability.

I would therefore like us to evaluate critical infrastructure somewhat differently.

Not everything needs to be produced locally. Autarky would itself make us poorer and potentially less secure.

But food, energy, healthcare, digital infrastructure and strategically important production need sufficient redundancy that disruption doesn’t immediately turn into existential scarcity.

Because scarcity does something politically dangerous.

It turns cooperation into distributional conflict.

And distributional conflict can turn neighbours into competitors, groups into enemies and eventually politics into a struggle for survival.

This is ultimately connected to peace

This is the part I find most important.

War doesn’t suddenly appear when someone decides to fire the first shot.

Long before that, societies can develop structures in which domination increasingly seems rational.

Fear.

Scarcity.

Humiliation.

Extreme inequality of power.

The belief that another group’s gain necessarily means one’s own loss.

The conviction that compromise equals weakness.

If our economic systems continuously reproduce those conditions, peace policy cannot begin only with diplomacy or defence.

It has to begin much earlier.

A resilient society in which losing your job doesn’t mean losing your existence is peace infrastructure.

Affordable housing is peace infrastructure.

Reliable energy is peace infrastructure.

Independent institutions are peace infrastructure.

Education is peace infrastructure.

A functioning democracy in which losing an election doesn’t mean losing your fundamental rights is peace infrastructure.

None of these things eliminates conflict.

They make conflict survivable.

Three layers of society

The model I increasingly find useful is surprisingly simple.

The first layer is the foundation.

It contains what people need for a dignified existence. Markets can help provide it, but nobody should fall beneath a basic threshold simply because they lack purchasing power.

The second layer is the market.

Here competition can be powerful. Companies compete. People invest. New products emerge. Some ideas fail, others become enormously successful. Inequality can exist here without automatically becoming existential exclusion.

The third layer is power.

This is where we need particularly strong boundaries. Wealth shouldn’t simply purchase legislation, monopolies, political dependency or control over essential infrastructure.

The market can be unequal.

Human dignity cannot.

And political sovereignty shouldn’t have a price tag.

Maybe prosperity needs a broader definition

There’s also a cultural dimension that regulation alone can’t solve.

If we measure personal success almost exclusively through accumulation—income, property, portfolios, status symbols—competition doesn’t disappear once everyone’s basic needs are met.

It simply moves upward.

Perhaps a mature affluent society should become better at recognising other forms of achievement:

Creating something useful.

Caring for someone.

Teaching.

Repairing ecosystems.

Building a good company.

Contributing to a neighbourhood.

Discovering something.

Making beautiful things.

Solving difficult problems.

We don’t have to stop rewarding financial success. We can simply stop treating it as the universal measurement of human value.

Money should be a tool, not a survival system

So I don’t think the goal should be a society without money, markets, investment or returns.

I would rather aim for something more subtle:

A society in which money remains powerful enough to coordinate economic activity, but not powerful enough to determine human worth, basic survival or democratic power.

That means protecting the foundation from complete market exclusion.

Protecting markets from excessive concentration.

And protecting political institutions from economic capture.

Germany and the European Union already contain pieces of this architecture. The question isn’t whether we should replace everything.

It’s whether we can strengthen the boundaries before crises weaken them.

Because ultimately, I think there is a connection between economic security and peace that we underestimate.

The more people can lose without losing their dignity, existence or voice, the less every conflict has to become existential.

And perhaps that’s one of the most important characteristics of a peaceful society:

Not that it has no conflicts, but that people can lose something without having to destroy someone else to survive.