Post photo: man with e-scooter | © Shutterstock
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Independence Day
Today I congratulate our American friends on their national day. As has been shown over the past two centuries, this holiday is also a good thing for the rest of the free world, because what would Europe be without America's support.
The Ukrainians, who would already be history again without a free and democratic USA, are currently experiencing this. And for that reason alone, we Europeans should use today to give our American friends a little more help instead of taking every conceivable opportunity to kick their ass.
That's why I find it more than underground that popular European politicians are now trumpeting the urgent need for Europe to become independent of the USA. And predictably, these spending democrats are already getting their first round of applause from the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China and North Korea.
Socialism
Still the buzzword for well-fed children from better backgrounds. Poor people have known for some time that they cannot live on mere promises of a better future world, otherwise they would continue to populate our churches. The somewhat more intelligent poor, of which there are certainly also, also recognize that the mere redistribution of tax money cannot lead to the goal either, because societies are not structured that simply.
These more intelligent people then become communists in order to force themselves to the top of the food chain, or they grow up and try to make the world a little better with better-functioning economic and social models.
The full-fledged socialists continue to just make themselves comfortable in society and make sure that they do not miss out on the redistribution themselves - this only works well as long as there is enough money and material resources for redistribution. The socialists accept the negative side effects of this mere redistribution policy.
And so it is not surprising that after a few decades of socialist leadership in France, the streets are burning. The socialists now blame the market economy and the liberals for this. This is still better than self-critically considering what is wrong with one's own political model.
And also in Berlin or the new federal states one can observe quite clearly how a welfare state that has gone completely out of control is breaking up every society. The conservative forces demonstrably do not function as a corrective - at most as a fire accelerator.
If we want to get our societies to function, then we need more liberality and responsibility again. However, this should not be confused with "predator capitalism", because this would be like going from bad to worse.
Here, too, the path lies somewhere in the middle, namely in a meritocracy that can and wants to afford weaker fellow citizens the necessary assistance so that they can also get involved in society for the benefit of the same. A socialist once told me that "work is the best way to integrate" and I agree that for some people this is actually the only way to go.
And until then, I'll just listen to the socialists explain to all of us what has gone wrong in France over the last few decades - oh, if only they had had the chance to make things better in France!
Markt
The market seems to continue to work, at least if you don't get involved with transfer payments of all kinds. And so we were able to learn recently that the formerly four e-scooter provider are becoming fewer and fewer in Heilbronn. It wouldn't surprise me if the last one soon withdrew from Heilbronn.
In order to run such a service profitably, you need a minimum number of people and that is obviously not available in Heilbronn. That's why a Segway provider and other innovative car rental companies failed before and Uber didn't even come to the city.
All those who, like me from the start, were annoyed by the reckless behavior of the e-scooter drivers and also had serious doubts about the advantages of these vehicles for our environment can now be a little happy.
Let's all hope that the city administration doesn't start subsidizing a few e-scooter providers or even simply giving away e-scooters - as has been the case on a regular basis - bicycles, so that these vehicles can still be found in the cityscape.
"Socialism is nihilistic, in the henceforth precise sense that Nietzsche confers on the word. A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists. In this sense, all forms of socialism are manifestations, degraded once again, of Christian decadence.”
Albert Camus, Nietzsche and Nihilism in The Rebel (1951)
