George Rebane
Progressive organs around the world are starting to hyper-palpitate about the EU economy, sovereign debts, and unexpected violence in the streets. The Economist and Time are in general agreement that Europe is “about to blow”. And it’s all due to the planned and announced budget cuts because their governments are rapidly running out of other people’s money. The continent’s social programs have finally started taking down entire nations, and there is no end in sight to the spreading economic blight.
The post-Wall economic boom of 1991-2008 has come to an end. Eurozone and socialism was supposed to “bring about economic stability and remove traditional barriers to growth such as tariffs and regulations.” Don’t get excited that these mavens have finally discovered that tariffs and regulations are frictions to business. No, no – they only apply to trans-national barriers that must be removed, before growth can resume.
You see, the entire problem is that the EU has become a “selfish union in which flailing economies feed rising nationalism, angst over immigration, and simmering distrust between rich and less affluent countries.” And again, all this because the continent’s political union is yet incomplete.
The 22aug11 issue of Time points out that, just like people, entire countries go for the gold ring in their own inimitable ways determined by their culture and resources – no one holds back. And when a country provides economic freedom to its people, guess what, some people tend to do better than others. All of these factors are raining down on the European policy naifs, they never thought such inequalities could come about. Their models of socialist altruism prohibited these realities.
Today the UK’s Gini Index (0.34) is quoted to demonstrate its “wealth gap”, which it is hoped that the uninformed will equate with the poor end getting poorer. But the importance of the GI as a bamboozling tool will grow in the coming months. You will see it being cited more and more as redistribution arguments grow in intensity. (GI = 0 denotes that everyone in an economy earns exactly the same amount – ‘perfect equality’; GI = 1 says that all income goes to a single earner, everyone else gets zero.)
The GI says nothing of how its value relates to quality of life (QoL). The socialists, especially in the UN, hope that you will interpret lower values to come with an increased QoL. The truth is that the GI, like the Laffer curve, is double valued – along with GDP, QoL goes down percipitously at both ends of zero and one. (RR readers were informed of this index here.)
The UN placed America’s GI at 0.40, and some may even place it higher. (And now that those dastardly Chinese have departed from the teachings of Mao and Marx, their income inequality and GI are increasing – it’s already at 0.47, more unequal than ours.) The message here is that there must be better ways to hold good people down so that they can only earn their fair share. We in the US know, of course, that President Obama’s administration has legions working on programs that do just that – Social Justice Űber Alles!
There is grudging acknowledgement that EU’s politicians have long led America in vote buying policies that have brought them to the edge of an economic abyss. But according to Time, to “clean up their act” would require a “real political union”. In other words, they need more socialism with big guns to enforce the dictates of a big continental government. This will guarantee redistribution from the industrious to the laggards, and overcome such things as Germany’s selfish hesitation to write the big checks. It is then that we see EU (and US) businesses no longer “struggle with … stagnating demand” that is the real cause of this “ second Great Contraction” (the first was during the 1930s).
There is no mention of higher taxes, stifling regulations, striking unions, unskilled workers, and all manner of other frictions that may have contributed to today’s crisis. None of this seems to reside between any ears that sit in the European Parliament. Instead, the reason for the unrest is that the UK and US have a “large, immobile underclass”. According to a survey, in the UK only two out of five feel they have upward mobility. In the US two out of three have the same feeling. (Given the literacy and skill levels of American adults, I’m amazed that only one of three of us feel so encumbered.)
Coming full circle, the immediate blame for blood in the gutters is put on UK government cuts. But Prime Minister Cameron’s cuts have not yet taken effect, and data shows that people fared no better during the Tony Blair years. It then appears that the rioting has been fomented by a bit of class warfare; it’s all about who Cameron and his crowd are, and not what they have yet done.
The Brits are in a poor position to put down this large scale “thuggery” in their cities. Established during the previous centuries of cultural homogeneity, England’s constabulary have worked on policing through community “trust and consent”. It is clear to even the most socially liberal of them that this doesn’t work anymore within a multikulti society. After 190 years of unarmed bobbies, it took them only two days to get out the rubber bullets and water cannons. Full metal jackets are next. You cannot garner consent from people whose behavior is foreign to you, and whom you no longer trust.
The truth is that the British government long past gave up trusting its people – the people’s guns were taken years ago. Now the new problem is “knife violence”, with hundreds recently arrested to confiscate knives. It will be sad entertainment to see what means are left to Her Majesty’s subjects for fending off their cretins who don’t observe such civic restrictions.
All this said and done, the only thing left that our media mavens and their economic experts recommend is a “whiff of inflation to wipe out debt”. In short, begin destruction of the euro, for a whiff never got anyone anywhere unless they followed Napoleon’s classical nostrum – and, dear reader, it may yet again come to grapeshot to muzzle the masses.
Finally, with nothing but bankrupt policies to offer, the lamestream globalists conclude that “It’s the end of an era in which the West and Western ideas of how to create prosperity succeeded.” And we are next.
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