Bill Wirtz is the senior policy analyst for the Consumer Choice Center. He focuses specifically on evidence-based policy-making, agricultural and trade policy, as well as lifestyle choice. Originally from Luxembourg, he publishes in German, French, and English. He has appeared in Fox News, Sky News, Le Monde, Times of London, Le Figaro, Die Welt, The Hill, and other major news outlets in the world.
Bill recently released “Control Freaks”, a new podcast series, where he delves into impactful personalities that seek to undermine choice and evidence-based policy-making, and replace your choices with theirs. He is also the author of the podcast series “Fun Police”, which has already launched its second season and delves into the issue of neo-prohibitionism, the movement that attempts to ban “vices” such as vaping, smoking, drinking, gambling, and others. For more on that topic, read our last interview.
SpeakFreely: You are from Luxembourg, which is in many ways a very odd place on Earth since it fuses together two polar opposites. On one hand, so much of its wealth was built on low taxes and having good, limited business regulation. For instance, Luxembourg has the best asset management law in the EU, attracting all those investment funds to come to Luxembourg and it has had much lower taxes in certain areas. On the other hand, it is a welfare state on steroids. It just has an endless supply of money and funds crazy, often incredibly expensive projects. It reminds me of this quote from Thatcher, where she said: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money”. Is this the main problem with politics in Luxembourg? It just seems that the perspective of running out of other people’s money is not close enough for politicians in Luxembourg.
Bill Wirtz: I remember that 10 years ago, somebody ran the numbers and calculated that if we got one more million high-skilled migrants to Luxembourg, every Luxembourgish person could just work for the government and make a lot of money and not do much. And that is the sort of thinking in Luxembourg. I find that fascinating. It very much encompasses the Luxembourgish spirit, because not so much through its ingenuity, but a lot by chance and by the fact that the regulations in our neighbouring countries were so terrible, Luxembourg has become this financial hub. And nobody in government can really explain to you how that works. Like when they make public transport “free”. Free of charge, that is, but they call it free. They think that the money was just there and it was theirs to spend. They do not realise that there is a French hedge fund manager with eight screens somewhere in the basement of BNP Paribas that made this possible. They just do not get it. They really do not understand how the country works, and neither do a lot of Luxembourg citizens. Most Luxembourgish people have no understanding of how the country operates. They complain about the traffic and all the foreigners who do not speak Luxembourgish, but they do not really understand how the country works. So that is a fundamental problem, because if you go to Singapore, people understand how the country works. They have a clear understanding of where the money comes from. It is also a more educated society, but that is a fundamental problem, and that is where those contradictions come from. It is still an interesting financial hub, but Luxembourg tries to spend money it really does not have. It builds buildings that are way too expensive.
You do not see that expressed yet in the debt-to-GDP ratio, even though the debt-to-GDP ratio has been going up considerably over the last 20 years in Luxembourg. Still, if you compare to the neighbours we … [Wirtz laughs] we still respect the convergence criteria. Who still respects the Maastricht criteria? It is like us, Cyprus and Malta. Everyone has completely given up on those years ago since the last financial crisis. It is really hard to explain to someone from the libertarian circles. People always come to me and say: Oh you are from Luxembourg? You have no problems. And I am like: No, not exactly how I’d frame it. We have an education to do. It is just that you do not really get a libertarian sentiment in Luxembourg. because most people are financially stable, and that is why you just do not have that interest in those ideas.
SF: One of the countries that people often confuse with Luxembourg is Liechtenstein. And it seems that Luxembourg is doing all the stuff wrong, while Liechtenstein seems to be doing quite right. Their Prince seems to have a lot in common with classical liberalism. Do you think that there are some interesting parallels between the two countries?
BW: Liechtenstein, unlike Luxembourg, does not try and play in the same league as a country. It is an independent country, but its currency is the Swiss franc. It relies on Switzerland for most things. It is considerably smaller, both in size and population. Liechtenstein does not have a foreign minister who goes to the UN and tries to lecture other countries on how they do their business. Luxembourg is a big country in the body of a small country, and it acts that way. The Luxembourgish political class is very inspired by France. The Luxembourgish political class loves to receive the French President and get inspiration from all these beautiful services that the French government provides, and how beautifully it is working out. Clearly. It is a different political culture, and Lichtenstein, when they look at their neighbour, it is Switzerland. And if anything, that makes you more libertarian, if that is your influence. That is because of the constitutional system in Switzerland, which we could talk about for hours. But Luxembourg does not have quite that culture. It does not have the same history in that sense as well, and I think that is where its problems come from.
SF: Luxembourg is riddled with all kinds of Byzantine projects, one of the biggest ones being the supposedly free public transport. As we know, it is free because it runs on volunteers. There are no paid bus drivers. Free trams and free buses grow on trees in Luxembourg. Is Luxembourg making other countries follow stupid ideas like this because they seem to work here?
BW: They really love getting the headlines. And they really love the talk that we are the first country that makes public transport free, and so on. To be fair, the ticket sales and public transport made up about 1/3 of the running cost of the public transport system, so it was not that big of a leap. If anything, the conclusion should have been to make public transport more expensive. If you look at the tram in Amsterdam, I think it is a really cool system because you beep in with your card and you beep out, so you only pay for what you use. That kind of system makes a lot more sense, and it is also adjusted to the overall inflation level. Malta has become since the second country to make public transport free. For those people who are interested, you can read up on the buses in Malta. The buses in Malta are so dangerous that even the guy in charge of running them would not send his own son on a bus trip in Malta because they are just so in disrepair. Even though that won’t happen in Luxembourg, because we will spend too much money on everything, still, just because you made it free, it does not mean it serves people in the way it is supposed to. If anything, now if your bus driver is 15 minutes late and you get in and tell him Hey, you’re late. He will be like: Well, you’re not like you paid something for it, right? You did not get a ticket. So you do not have that customer and service relationship. If people pay for something, they have an expectation, and firms try for that expectation to be met. Now, for most people who are employees their income tax is deducted before they receive a net salary. They do not even know how much taxes their employer paid to hire them. So they do not have that relationship with those services and as a result, I expect that those services will get a lot worse in Luxembourg. And that goal of getting people to switch to public transport, making that more efficient, it is just not there. I am not a huge car geek, but in Luxembourg, you need a car because the public transport system just is not where it should be. If you try to go out at night, the taxis cost a fortune because they are run by one big monopoly. If anything, there is a real need for a metro system in Luxembourg City. Bonn has a metro system, so why shouldn’t Luxembourg? So there are all those infrastructure needs, but instead, they do these cosmetic changes on how much the ticket is or that the ticket does not exist anymore. That does not solve anything. You just move money from A to B. There’s no creation. There is no support for people there in any sense.
SF: I find Luxembourg’s politics very depressing because there is no way anything will change. In 2021, there was this debate in Luxembourgish Parliament about the wine that was served on the state-owned airline, which was not Luxembourgish enough for the politicians. There is just this overwhelming focus on nonsense. There just does not seem to be any problem that could drive any real change.
BW: The question was about Luxair, which used to serve Luxembourgish Crémant but stopped and started to serve French champagne or Italian Prosecco. These are the kind of things that they get busy with in Parliament. I mean, honestly, if they are distracted by these kinds of details, that is not always a bad thing. There used to be this veteran socialist Member of Parliament in Luxembourg, and he would often fall asleep, and I would always say, Why are you complaining about him sleeping? Please don’t wake him up if he wakes up, he’ll have all sorts of ideas to do. Honestly, members of Parliament should have as few sessions as possible and be allowed to sleep in the chamber. I really do not care. Just don’t get any ideas.
That’s the problem with the European Parliament. There are 751 members of the European Parliament. No wonder they come up with regulations and ideas to amend regulations all the time, because what else are they going to do? So in Luxembourg, the system should actually incentivise to do as little as possible. 90% of votes in the Luxembourg Parliament are unanimous, so you can see that there is no real debate happening. There are no two sides; there is one big group of people with these tiny party differences. I mean, even the communist party isn’t fully Marxist, and the right-wing party is like a joke of a right-wing party if anything. And the Liberals are definitely not liberals. The Greens are greens, at least you got to give them that. They are the authentic version. I do not follow Parliament much anymore. I don’t get much from it, to be honest.
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