Wealth & Money Quote by Gerhard Schroder

Schroder is smuggling a political trade into the language of inevitability. By calling an open market the "precondition" for a successful economy, he frames liberalization not as a choice with winners and losers, but as the entrance fee to modernity. The sentence is built like a set of locked doors: open markets unlock growth; growth unlocks the ability to fund social security. If you want the last thing - the welfare state - you must accept the first thing - market openness. It is a neat rhetorical move because it borrows the moral legitimacy of social protection to sell policies that often feel like their opposite.

The subtext is aimed at skeptics of globalization and labor-market reform: you can keep your safety net, but only if you stop treating markets as something to be managed for stability and start treating them as something to be maximized for dynamism. Schroder is also recoding "social security" as a fiscal problem rather than a social contract. The promise becomes technocratic: sustainability over solidarity, affordability over entitlement.

Context matters. Schroder governed a Germany facing high unemployment, slow growth, and the pressures of EU competition and an aging population. His Agenda 2010 reforms were pitched as painful but necessary modernization, often criticized as shrinking protections in the name of competitiveness. This quote captures that governing logic: welfare is reimagined as the dividend of market discipline, not a buffer against it. The line works because it offers a comforting endpoint (pensions paid) while making the uncomfortable middle (openness, reform, exposure) sound nonnegotiable.