Ambition

The cleverness of the fox consists of 50% of the stupidity of the chickens, I read recently when I was thinking about why the CO2-free nuclear power plants were switched off in a self-inflicted energy shortage and Germany finally became the importing country of electricity from the nuclear power plants of the neighboring countries.
There we have it, the supposedly “no alternative” energy transition, right next to the opening of the borders for uncontrolled migration and instead of a comprehensive structural reform that would have made our country more efficient.

In the meantime, a bloated state apparatus, accompanied by inflation, a shortage of skilled workers, deindustrialisation, escalating bureaucracy, a planned economy and a constantly growing tax burden are gradually choking the German economy. At the same time, the number of corporate bankruptcies is increasing rapidly.
Beneath the apparently still rich surface of our country, which allows millions of people worldwide to get on planes and boats in the direction of asylum applications, poverty is severely impoverished, around a third of the people in Germany now belong to the lower class.

The idea of performance is more and more in the background and while one in four primary school graduates no longer meets the minimum requirements, tape measures and stopwatches are abolished at the federal youth games. Equality is the new justice and it can be done effortlessly, is the dubious message here. Not without danger for the young generation, because in a rapidly changing world full of huge technological upheavals, the lack of performance orientation can quickly make you a loser.

The development described is no longer conceivable today without the power of public broadcasting to influence opinions. Financed by a compulsory fee, legally obliged to be balanced and with the mandate to guarantee free opinion-forming, the citizen receives a politically one-sided attitude journalism, which is happy to have its convictions confirmed in so-called opinion polls by its own employees. In fact, radio, television and a large part of the press succeed every day in diverting attention from the abuses in their own country to something else, meaning saving the global climate. Here we are the good guys and the rest has to go along with us, it says with the raised index finger, which is not aimed at the government but at the population. And there it is again, that German arrogance, quite a few of our European neighbors are now saying.

But if the goal of green politics is to transform our country into a degrowth society, a society of renunciation, we can oppose it. Because this vision cannot work in a global world. With 83 million people in Germany, we make up just 1 percent of the world’s population, and most of the 4 billion people in China, India and Africa probably have completely different plans. In our presumptuous efforts to save the global climate on our own, we ultimately take the means and every ability to act to be able to really influence things in the long term.

Especially since we should know better: Negative economic growth primarily and always affects the poorest. Nowhere on earth is there a functioning social system without prosperity. Without prosperity there is no environmental protection. And so far no country in the world has achieved prosperity with a planned economy. There is only prosperity with performance. However, performance requires ambition, i.e. striving for something higher. In order to promote this, politics should set the framework, but it is lived in the home and family, in schools, universities and companies, and ultimately by each and every one of us.

In this sense

Ernst M. Ehrenkönig / CEO & Managing Partner