The best thing that can currently happen to an entrepreneur - and also to a company founder - in Austria is to break even. If he fails to do so, he has failed in the eyes of the public and is the "nation's fool". If he succeeds, he must immediately fend off the envious who accuse him of raking in millions at the expense of employees and the environment. This false image of entrepreneurship is unfortunately already being taught to our young people in secondary schools. I am not surprised that under such conditions fewer and fewer people want to implement their own ideas and become entrepreneurs.
All the more impressive to me however are those who nevertheless dare to take the step. Like the HTL students from Rankweil, for example, who are developing autonomous excavators with their start-up Sodex. Or the Bregenz "Limomacher" with their home-brewed, personalised lemonades. They sacrifice free time, sweat and not seldom private financial assets to their ideas or even take out loans - without guarantees, without real security. They deserve all the support we can give them.
Because we need these clever minds and courageous doers. We desperately need them. It is common knowledge that every prosperity and every benefit provided by the welfare state must first be generated. This is not possible without the economy. At least not without an economy that guarantees freedom of contract, supports factors of production in private ownership and whose prices are formed by supply and demand. And - last but not least - which gives everyone who has an idea the opportunity to implement it and offer it to others.
But there are also justified voices that postulate a new modesty, the end of growth, and that want to pay for future services exclusively with freshly printed money from the printing press. I see this in another light: Growth of the right and successful things is important, not that of the entire system. We should therefore accept that - as in nature - things also die out again. But at the moment we prevent this far too often because we have made these things "system-relevant" - in the financial crisis, for example.
Let's give work, performance, courage and risk-taking back their value and at the same time use the potential released by the crisis. There should be more local Blums and Alplas in 30 years.
