Wealth & Money Quote by Vaclav Klaus

Klaus is drawing a hard line between building a playing field and picking the winners. Coming out of late socialism, that distinction wasn’t semantic; it was a political weapon. In post-1989 Central Europe, “planning” didn’t mean benign coordination. It meant a whole state apparatus claiming the right to decide what people produced, earned, and even imagined as possible. So when Klaus insists on “rules” rather than “outcome,” he’s laundering the market of its moral anxiety: the state can be present, but only as referee, never as author.

The subtext is a warning aimed at two audiences at once. To domestic skeptics, it says: the chaos you fear isn’t a failure of reform, it’s the necessary turbulence of freedom. To Western advisers and local technocrats tempted by “industrial policy” or gradualism, it says: don’t smuggle planning back in under a nicer label. The sentence performs a subtle inversion: rules are framed as neutral and humble, while outcomes are framed as arrogant and coercive. That rhetorical move lets Klaus champion a strong state in one breath and anti-statism in the next.

Context matters because “rules” are not politically innocent in a transition economy. Privatization methods, property rights enforcement, bankruptcy law, antitrust policy, who gets credit, how corruption is policed: these are outcome-shaping choices disguised as procedural housekeeping. Klaus’s line works because it offers a clean democratic promise - we won’t dictate your life - while quietly reserving enormous power for whoever writes the rulebook.