In addition to these tasks of the competitive system, the German concept of the social market economy expressly incorporates elements of social compromise into the overall system.
One of my neoliberal university teachers, Professor Alfred Müller-Armack, who was from the start a close associate of Ludwig Erhard, once rather pointedly expressed this as follows: “It was a momentous error on the part of economic liberalism to regard distribution by the market as already being intrinsically satisfactory in social and political terms, and thus to combine the question of the appropriate technical form of exchange with the question of what is socially and governmentally desirable.”1 For me, the market economy is more than just the appropriate technical form of exchange.