House of Common Sense
April 2 at 1:30 PM
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Powerful words by the usually satirical Mathias Schmidt. A very tragic truth too:
Europe does not matter anymore.
We followed the idea that we should produce less, consume less, want less.
No civilization in history has ever decided to shrink on purpose and survived. We are trying to be the first.
We disguised it as superior quality of life. Work-life balance. Slow living. Not defining yourself by your salary.
We dressed up societal decline in feel-good words and repeated them until we actually believed it, or perhaps made peace with falling behind.
We do not live to work, we work to live, we told ourselves.
We used to fly Concordes. We used to build the fastest trains, the best cars, the most advanced infrastructure on the planet.
That continent does not exist anymore.
Not a single globally relevant technology company has come out of Europe in the last 20 years.
The best doctors, founders, and engineers leave for the US, because Europe punishes ambition. Our culture treats wanting more as a character flaw. Ideas get buried under permits, regulations, and committees staffed by people who have never built anything.
Wealth is not the enemy of a good life, but Europe has decided that the people who create value are the problem. We taxed them, regulated them, shamed them, and drove them out.
You cannot consume wealth you do not create. You cannot have a high quality of life on a continent that has decided making money is immoral.
Quality of life costs money. We want the best healthcare, the best public transport, and the best education. And we also want nobody to work too hard, nobody to get too rich, nobody to build too fast, nobody to compete too aggressively.
Europe tells its citizens that life is not about money. A 35-year-old who has no savings, cannot afford children, and will never own a home is no longer thrilled to hear that.
Somewhere along the way we've decided to shift budgets away from industry, research, innovation, and toward an ever-expanding social state. We stopped investing in what creates wealth and started only distributing it.
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