Mr. Jens carefully placed his cup back on the plate. The bottom edge of the cup sank into the cold coffee. His look revealed that he still resented Claire the mistake.

"The reason that your public companies are profitable is in no part due to your management, but much more to the fact that you prohibit all others from trading abroad. The public companies make profits on the world market and use the money to keep up with the private sector domestically. That's the whole answer to his question. The rest was unnecessary. You have low taxes, you say. But that has nothing to do with your benevolence. You only have to look at your tax law to see what it's all about. The threshold for value added tax is high. Corporation tax is progressive. The administrative burden for small businesses is negligible. You are only interested in supporting small companies and fleecing large ones. Small companies are supposed to be lucrative and easy to grow up to compete with medium-sized companies so that they don't continue to grow and compete with the public companies. You don't want large private-sector companies on 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 abundance. Hardly anyone profits from this, because the country's mountains, lakes and rivers are mainly owned by your public companies. They were gifts. You gave them away, after buying them from the old nobility, always at horrendous prices, always far above market value; all just to outbid the private sector, usually from the state coffers. It's not as if you always reached into your own pockets, although they were certainly deep. Of all things, the most expensive and the biggest failure was the fernium mine in the north, which is almost exhausted, which they only found out after you had already bought it. The taxpayer bears the loss. Thanks to your openness, everyone can read how much you have sunk there. The mine wouldn't have paid for itself for another 24 years. Now it hasn't lasted quite that long. All of this just so that you can show off abroad as an brilliant entrepreneur, whereupon you are always rightly ridiculed. The fact that your public companies make a profit with this amount of preferential treatment is not impressive. I guarantee you that in the next few years, when the ore in the north is exhausted, the first of your public companies will go down, then everything in the metal industry that loses its supplier, and then you can explain the boy again why you are successful."

"Once the ore has run out... You misjudge me. It's true that I don't want competition, but who does? If I couldn't keep the others down so easily through legislation, I'd be forced to eat them up or drive them out of the market like everyone else does. It's more pleasant this way. Our tax law is also about keeping the bureaucratic burden as low as possible. For example, if you want to open a business, you can usually just do it without having to register it in advance. It's nonsense to check every little thing, if there's not much in it, because in this case too everyone forgets that it's all connected. The expenses that all 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 their creation. Money is infinite. Workforce is the limited commodity and I prefer to invest wisely. As for Schwarzberg, they will not close, but a large number of jobs will be cut. That has already been decided. It just hasn't been announced yet. What is to be done? There just wasn't as much ore as expected. Things like that happen. It's my responsibility, which is why the files are publicly accessible, as is the case with many things that I decide. It has nothing to do with me feeling guilty, if that's what they want to imply. I can't sink anything either. The money is not gone. It comes back into my coffers on its own through taxes. The Schwarzberg workforce will be informed at the end of the year and then the redundancies will be announced. The rest will be settled with mining licenses. If you are interested, you are welcome to make an offer to Schwarzberg. They will handle it themselves. As for the chain involved, they can of course still make a profit with another supplier. The success of state-owned companies has nothing to do with the fact that I forbid everyone else from foreign trade. Because I don't ban anyone from foreign trade. If anything, you could say that Baele restricts the export and import of certain goods under certain conditions. Every other country does that as well, only for different goods and under 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 might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

"You can't seriously say that. Just as an example, you are completely banned from importing grain if you don't have a contract with one of your public companies, or if you are not otherwise approved by the government. You are also completely banned from exporting grain if you are not a public company or if you have not fully stored around a year's harvest. Nobody does that. It's not profitable. You're more likely to set up a second production location abroad and sell there, provided you can afford the investment. That's not free trade. That's protectionism as a pretext to curb the private sector."

"This has nothing to do with oppression. If a foreign company wants to import to us, it simply needs a permit. We have certain quality requirements that have to be met. I don't want cheap foreign goods to flood our market. If a company submits an application and we then find that they are not paying reasonable wages or that the working conditions are not being met, then we simply won't issue a permit. We don't want to support that. We don't need it that much. 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 received a permit last year?"

"Few, but there were hardly any applications."

"Why do you think there were hardly any?"

"If you don't sell luxury items or exotic goods, it's not worth the cost of importing them to us. People prefer to come here with their money and do everything here."

"You close your country off because you are afraid of the competition. That's the only reason. The Catastrophe Protection Act is also only there for that. In my eyes, it's still the biggest joke of all to claim that that is necessary. Like everyone else in the world, I know 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 few years after the decision. Do you really think that after almost two decades the companies still haven't figured out how to maintain stocks? With the grain, of course, you have also taken what has the highest requirements. But to stay with the example, the oldest part is processed into animal feed and stored again from the new harvest. It is also a very rough simplification to describe the specified 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 being criticized."

"You can sugarcoat it all you like, but to me it still just sounds like excuses."

.../ End Part