The Thwarted Benefactor

On 8 February 2022, a few days after his seventy-eighth birthday and after a long illness, Götz Wolfgang Werner died in Stuttgart. He had built from nothing the largest drugstore chain in Europe, a company in which the work of the shop assistant was meant to count for as much as that of the manager; he was an anthroposophist, a reader of Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom, and he devoted the last part of his life to a single idea: the unconditional basic income, an income for all. He described himself as a disinherited son, a realist-dreamer, a founder against his will. Today he is almost forgotten, and we wish to say only good of him. We take the old duty seriously, de mortuis nil nisi bonum — and we will keep it to the end. That is harder than it sounds. For the good that can be said of him turns, on closer inspection, into the most instructive of warnings.

The Good We Say

Let us begin there, and without reservation. His sincerity is beyond question. A man who places his name, his fortune and his good reputation behind an idea would, had he been a cynic, have been wiser to keep silent. Werner did not keep silent. He was a friend of mankind, and he meant it. The humane core of his idea, too, is not foolish. That a person's existence should not hang on the sale of their labour; that dignity and earning might be uncoupled; that advancing automation lets productivity and poverty grow at once and thereby turns the economic problem in truth into a problem of distribution — this is no nonsense, it is a serious diagnosis. He saw real suffering; he liked to point out that one in five was threatened by poverty or exclusion, and he wanted it to end. We doubt none of these sentences. Up to here the praise is undivided.

Why Piety Demands We Look at the Instrument

And yet a benefactor is measured not by his wish but by what his gift would have done. Piety itself compels us to look at the instrument. For to wave him through out of reverence would be not to take him seriously — it would be to praise him as a saint rather than to test him as a thinker. We test him. Werner's instrument was a single tax. He wanted to finance the basic income — which by his plan was to grow over fifteen to twenty years from a few hundred euros at first to around 1,300 to 1,500 euros a month — by abolishing all other taxes and replacing them with a consumption tax, a value-added tax of nearly half the price; critics calculated that it would have to be closer to eighty or a hundred percent. Abolished in this conversion would be the wage and income tax, the capital-gains tax and, in his own words, in the end the corporate taxes entirely. The justification sounded compelling: all taxes were hidden in prices anyway, so one should honestly tax consumption directly.

The Invisible Price of the Visible Gift

Here the praise tips over, and it tips not at the man but at his mechanism. A consumption tax does not ask about wealth; it asks about the consumption ratio — and that ratio falls the richer one is. No one consumes in proportion to what they own. The poor pensioner spends almost her entire income and would be taxed on nearly all of it; the wealthy person consumes only a fraction and would bear the tax only on that fraction. The rest stays untaxed, grows, and is bequeathed. A single consumption tax is therefore not neutral; it is regressive by nature. And Werner's design did more than that: it abolished precisely those taxes that reach wealth, capital income, corporate profit at all. With that, his construction falls into two halves of very unequal visibility. The one half is the gift: a monthly sum for everyone, visible, personal, felt like security bestowed. The other half is the price: the elimination of every tax on property, invisible, because it consists of an omission. One sees the payment; one does not see the no-longer-levied capital and inheritance tax. Precisely this asymmetry between the visible gift and the invisible renunciation is the mechanism of every successful redistribution from the bottom upward. Werner's good deed, once made law, would have raised the floor a little and removed the ceiling entirely. The net recipients would have been the owners of capital, the net payers those who consume — that is, the very poor he wanted to save.

The Twofold Sense of the Word “Thwarted”

With that, the phrase of the thwarted benefactor acquires its double ring. In the first, mild sense he was thwarted from without: his proposal never became law, no government dared it, the idea remained an idea. In this sense he is the tragically restrained one, the realist-dreamer to whom reality begrudged the dream. But there is a second, deeper sense, and it is the real one. The good deed was thwarted from within, by the logic of the self-chosen instrument. It was not the world alone that stopped the benefactor, but his own idea. And in this lies a cruelty no one intended: precisely the poorest, who revered him most as a bringer of salvation, would have been most heavily burdened by his work. To them the gift was addressed; to them, too, the bill. There is, quietly, the border in the title as well: his income for all applied only to every German citizen. The benefactor of humanity drew the boundary of his benefaction at the nation-state.

Why the Arithmetic Did Not Reach Him

There remains the question of why so clever a man did not hear the objection that lay so plainly at hand. We do not believe it was arrogance. It was the rank the idea held for him. Even well-disposed observers from his own camp noted that the advocates of the consumption tax — he foremost — treated it as the fundamentally alternativeless path, not as one option among several. An idea one holds to be without alternative is no longer a hypothesis; it is a faith. And a faith is not refuted by a consumption ratio. Whoever showed him by calculation how the tax would fall on the poor rarely received an answer — not out of disdain, we suppose, but because the calculation was delivered in the wrong register. To the realist-dreamer the dignity of man was certain; the consumption ratio was to him a pettiness of bookkeepers. So the strongest argument against him was left lying in silence.

In Closing

We have kept our promise. We have said only good of him, for the good was real: the wish, the sincerity, the courage to commit his own fortune on behalf of the propertyless. The failure lay not in the man but in the instrument — and for that very reason his memory deserves not mockery but care. He wanted to be a benefactor of humanity; he remains a thwarted one. We keep him as the gentlest warning the subject knows: that the most dangerous redistributions upward do not always wear the face of greed. Sometimes they wear the face of a good man who meant every word. And precisely that, not any malice, is what makes them so hard to refuse. The benefactor was thwarted. Let us at least not let the lesson be thwarted too.