There's a nip in the air, the days have grown short, and it's time for a little vacation. Italy -- now that's the ticket! If it was good enough for Goethe, it should fill the bill for me and the missis. And what better way to get there than by train through the Alps? By German train, gentle reader! What could be more reliable, right? Denkste! German railway workers have been striking lately. The first strike, last Friday, snarled up mainly North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland. The second, on Wednesday, snarled up mainly Berlin. When, and where, will they strike next? We've got tickets for a train leaving Hamburg on Saturday. Will we leave on time? Will we leave at all? Only the Shadow knows.

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: After years of delays, the German government is now moving ahead with plans to privatize Deutsche Bahn, the national railway. Railway workers are pressing for job guarantees beyond the sell-off. It's all so very German, this Drang nach allumfassender Sicherheit. American-style "hire and fire" is considered a circle of hell. But too much security, like tight swaddling clothes, hinders movement, development, etc. So Germany has been loosening up a bit.

It still has a long way to go. "Deutschland sozialistischer als China!" screamed a recent headline in Bild-Zeitung (yes, Bild headlines always scream). The paper cited a World Bank study that rated Germany's labor market far more inflexible and bureaucratic than that of the People's Republic of China, a country that is run, after all, by a Communist party. I've never been to China, unfortunately (though I dare say I handle chopsticks better than most Big Noses), so I can't judge this for myself. I interviewed a Chinese businessman in Hamburg a couple of months ago, though, and you know what? He complained about German bureaucracy. Government services in China are more efficient, he noted, pointing to what he said was greater competition there.

Mr. Wang, to whom I had no time to show my chopsticks skills, also complained about the "high-class" Mercedes he bought in 2003. "The first year, I sent that Mercedes back to the company 11 times," he related glumly. "I was quite astonished."

In 2003, coincidentally, China put its first man in space. What if China, population 1.3 billion, sets its collective mind on building top-notch automobiles? Might the Germans have to switch to making luxury chopsticks?