Hard times have come to Europe and certainly to the Czech Republic, where January saw record unemployment. Perhaps irrationally, at the same time two Amazon mega-distribution centers that would have employed some five thousand Czechs bit the dust—one In Brno and the other in Prague. The young working generation, those who have no experience or remembrance of communist days, are impatient with being stretched to the limit by employers.

But hey, times are tough and a job is a job.

My feeling is that times may have only begun to get tough by the standards we know. America blindly leads the way by pumping up Wall Street and the banks, but there’s only so much air can be blown into that bubble, when job loss and productive capacity is down there as well. It seems only London and New York bankers and fund-managers are doing well and they’re doing extraordinarily well, while the rest of us may find ourselves a single job-loss or major medical crisis away from disaster. ‘Banksters’ is the new word for gangsters and, by either spelling, another crash is quite likely in the offing that will make 2008 look like a walk in the park. No one wants that, but wanting is a long way from preparing.

That’s the way it is. The challenge is how to best deal with the way it is.

Europe chose austerity and America chose to throw $trillions at the banks. The former suffocates growth and the latter robs the poor to enrich the minority. The question of who will serve and who will eat has no equitable answer on either side of the Atlantic. Austerity strangles recovery and the American template is both inequitable and terribly dangerous to long-term world economics.

Perhaps surprisingly to both Americans and Europeans, 60% of American GDP comes from small business. There’s a lesson there for the Czech Republic. Look at the Vietnamese community as an example—hundreds of small enterprises, from vecerkas and restaurants to tiny boutiques that support second and third-generation Vietnamese families, integrating them into Czech society. Yet Czech law and paperwork make small business needlessly difficult for their own citizens.

The young Czechs I know are eager entrepreneurs. This new generation thirsts to build and experiment, learning as they go and becoming the visible example to those who follow. They are perhaps the first generation since the First Republic willing to invest themselves in Leaps of Faith. What a flickering candle that is and how easily blown out. A national asset we dare not squander after forty years of communism.

Austerity has the tendency to blow out that fragile candle before it burns steadily and government has the absolute obligation to cup their protective hands around and nurture it. It’s lovely to see Volkswagen make a success of Skoda and brilliant to welcome Amazon here to distribute their goods to Europe, exciting to see Microsoft, Coca Cola and McDonalds in the country, but charity begins at home.

If Andre Babiš truly intends to build a better Czech society, he might put his political weight behind government-funded small business start-ups, from tiny computer programming innovators to diverse farming operations and small industrial suppliers. The entrepreneurial spirit can be taught and should be part of every school curriculum. This nation has a remarkable history of invention. That innovative spirit must be nurtured and supported, rather than stepped upon, no longer pandering to foreign interests that come here for our high skills and low wages.

Low wages are not a growth industry. In good times, we tend to forget what builds our societal strengths, happy enough to have a new TV and a chance at a better rental flat. But that’s not a growth industry either. We will always have workers and the working class is the backbone of a nation, as they pursue the opportunity to move up—or move their children up—into the middle class. Small businesses and diverse small agricultural enterprises can provide those opportunities. Microsoft, McDonalds, Coca Cola or Amazon will not do that. It’s not their business to do that.

It’s our business and we better get at it.