Berlin Targets Entrepreneurs: Apprenticeships, Punishment, And Social Decay

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

The German capital is hardly a hospitable place for entrepreneurs or founders. Ambitious individuals who aim to build a career outside the state subsidy system and establish their own livelihoods encounter, in this strangest of European capitals, an atmosphere of contempt and hostility.

Berlin politics, regardless of who is currently in power, fosters a culture of societal division. Parties spare no effort in masking the jointly caused economic and social distortions in the city with an endless media spectacle.

Unemployment rises—naturally, the entrepreneurs are blamed. Rents are unaffordable—it has, of course, nothing to do with open borders or mass immigration. Responsibility lies with the greed of landlords, who have elevated exploitation to their fundamental operating principle. In Berlin, apprenticeship positions are now scarce. Naturally, entrepreneurs are also blamed in this case. It could never be because politics, with its green ideological zeal, may have let the economy derail years ago.

To underline once again that Berlin is by no means willing to take responsibility for the visible crisis and instead prefers to put entrepreneurs in the pillory, the Berlin Senate has passed a corresponding law. Companies that fail to provide sufficient apprenticeship positions will be financially squeezed in the future.

Under the quaint title “Apprenticeship Promotion Fund Act” (AusbFFG), the all-knowing Berlin bureaucracy—yes, the same people who take six months to issue a new passport—will determine how many apprenticeship slots each company must offer.

The law was passed on March 26 and is set to take effect on January 1, 2028. Until then, the top economists and social-state engineers of the Red City Hall plan to complete the detailed calculations still required to determine the exact apprenticeship quota. The measure is based on each company’s gross wage sum.

In the eyes of typical Berlin socialists—and that includes all parties except the AfD—the economy is a monocausal monolith animated only by greed and profiteering, allowing the rule to be applied indiscriminately across all companies and sectors.

Naive, childish, maximally hostile: politics seeks conflict with entrepreneurs and investors because it knows that resentment in society always leaves a smoldering ember somewhere, which can be quickly fanned into a larger fire by the media. Berlin also knows very well that the country is heading for mass unemployment and that, should criticism or social unrest arise, a suitable lightning rod must always be at hand. Media-savvy tactics: debates on inheritance tax, the housing crisis, and the apprenticeship market are already being used to plant the narrative of the greedy failing entrepreneur in people’s minds.

It is shabby, socially destabilizing, but hardly surprising: socialist rot, indeed. This unreflective hatred, the agitation against the middle class and high achievers, forms socialism’s typical power source—resentment, cheap envy of others’ success. When this behavior is institutionalized in politics, it is a clear indicator of advanced societal and economic decay.

Berlin is long bankrupt. The neglect manifest across much of the city has become a visible hallmark of the unteachable nature of German socialists. Beyond Germany’s borders, one can study the societal decay of the country through its capital. A victim of Europe’s postmodern cultural rift, visible wherever open-border policies erode traditional cultural ferment, and where state bureaucracy thrives as the last line of defense for an impotent state apparatus that fears those whose social standing allows them to offer justified criticism of the visible rot in the community.

Certainly: the entrepreneurs, the self-employed, and investors are needed, only to have their financial resources extracted and the socialist experiment carried forward. That apprentices were chosen as vehicles for this plunder and media leverage comes as no surprise.

The political assault on entrepreneurs is now carried out on every possible level. The tighter the fiscal situation, the more aggressively politics lashes out. The logic is simple: those who do not follow the prescribed recipes and rules of politics—whether in training or emissions—are sanctioned. The complexity of the economy, differences in sectors, location, or individual businesses are ignored.

The gross wage sum becomes a moral metric, and the entrepreneur a prisoner of a political formula meticulously crafted in one of the countless party-state working groups.

Nowhere is this decay of German society more visible than in its parasitic capital, which hangs off the hinterland. The so-called Berlin political elite no longer claims to represent a societal engine of modernization and inspiration. Were it bold enough to present itself as a stabilizer of meritocratic values of performance and seriousness, it would be met only with biting mockery. Berlin remains Berlin, and its fundamental principle of rule is, quite Caesar-like: divida et impera—divide and rule, seek enemies that can be politically and media-wise exploited to distract from one’s own failures.

* * * 

About the author: Thomas Kolbe is a German graduate economist. For over 25 years, he has worked as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination