Archive for the ‘Welfare State’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

European Union to Become SuperDuper European Union

Friday, December 9th, 2011

Let me see if I can get this straight:

UK Prime Minister David Cameron, objecting to the Deutschland Uber Alles renegotiation of the Maastricht Treaty, is now causing the creation of a new SuperDuper Europe, with Germany reoccupying the Rhineland taking leadership of the whole shebang, finally erasing the rest of the continent’s reluctance at receiving orders from Berlin?

I mean, when even the Europhillic New York Times says that “Twenty years after the Maastricht Treaty, which was designed not just to integrate Europe but to contain the might of a united Germany, Berlin had effectively united Europe under its control,” maybe the citizens of those stodgy old entities we used to call “countries” should consider the possibility that they might may be making a mistake. I am especially surprised that the non-Euro-using generalgouvernement Poland gave in so readily, as their previous experiences with rule from Berlin have been less than exemplary.

But what’s sacrificing the last of your country’s vestigially sovereignty compared to the glorious dream of saving the Euro?

Assuming, of course, that forging this Pact of Steel (including a 500 billion Euro bailout fund) actually saves the Euro, which is a dubious proposition at best. And at least one U.S. general says we should be prepared for civil unrest if Euro ends up exploding anyway.

The irony, of course, is that David Cameron, the wetest Tory Wet PM since Neville Chamberlain, refused to give in to another Eurotreaty British citizens wouldn’t get a chance to vote on less than two months after refusing to allow a vote on the previous EU treaty British citizens were not allowed to vote on. It would be ironic if Cameron actually ended up pulling the UK out of the EU because, in a moment of weakness, he actually exhibited rare and uncharacteristic streaks of firm principle and common sense.

Will the citizens of Europe actually get a chance to vote on this Reich closer European integration? Doubtful. Ireland’s Taoiseach is being “cagey” about a vote. (Translation: Fark no, you peasants won’t get a vote.) I doubt any of his brothers in Europe’s Permanent Ruling Class will feel any less “cagey.”

Through a thousand small steps, from committees and working groups and consultations and emergency decrees, Eurocrats have done their very best to remove power for all important decisions from the hands of the people and entrust it into their own well-greased palms. And also, not so coincidentally, to avoid taking the blame for the ruin their cradle-to-grave welfare states, and the huge and ever-growing debts necessary to pay for them, have made of Europe’s once free nations and productive economies.

Other Eurozone news, some possibly stale and out of date:

  • Jim DeMint says the best way for us to help Europe is not to help Europe.
  • Portugal’s economy is shrinking.
  • Moody’s downgrades French banks.
  • Problem: Possibility of sovereign debt default means bond downgrades. Solution: Create a bailout fund. problem: Downgrade of bailout fund. Solution: ?????
  • Europe’s Coming Inflation:

    For years, Europeans loved to lecture Americans on the both the safety and soundness of the continent’s banking system as opposed to our own, and how their economic system worked so much better than ours. Well, one lesson of the 2011 financial crisis is that many of their banks are probably in worse shape than the US banks were in 2008.

    At least our banks’ troubled investments were tied to real estate, which may rebound once our economy improves. Their banks are holding debt tied to some of the world’s least productive, no-growth countries.

    Why so underproductive? Most of the evidence points to the failure of the European welfare state.

    Europeans loved to lecture Americans on how government-run health-care and cradle-to-grave entitlements provided such safety and comfort for the masses. People supposedly didn’t mind paying higher taxes because it enhanced their standard of living.

    Until, of course, it didn’t enhance anything — and Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal face the collapse of their safety nets because they can’t borrow to pay for them anymore, even as unemployment is rampant. (Meanwhile, France is not far behind.)

    • Tags:, , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Budget, Economics, Foreign Policy, Welfare State | 1 Comment »

    Ten Days to a EuroZone Collapse?

    Monday, November 28th, 2011

    So says a piece in the Financial Times, here excerpted from behind the paywall.

    Things are moving very fast indeed on the Euro front:

  • U.S. banks stop lending to European governments. While this is good news, the possibility that the Fed may rescue Europe is very, very bad news. Our own life raft is barely treading water, and now liberals want us to invite a dying elephant to climb aboard.
  • And not the Fed, then the IMF, which America also funds to a large extent.
  • This article from Der Spiegel is a good roundup on consensus wisdom, which boils down to the rest of Europe wondering why Angela Merkel won’t just give in and pay their bills.
  • There’s word she might even do it, but only if she can get France, Finland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Austria to join Germany in issuing “elite” Eurobonds. I mean, what’s another trillion in taxpayer equity flushed down the toilet in comparison to the beautiful dream of European integration?
  • Even Poland wants Germany to take a more active role, something that has not traditionally brought Poland tidings of comfort and joy.
  • Daniel Hannan at NRO provides a nice summary of the state of play:

    From the beginning, the Brussels elites made it clear that, to adapt Abraham Lincoln, their paramount object was to save the Union. Never mind if that meant imposing epochal poverty and emigration on the southern members, and unprecedented tax rises on the northern. Never mind if it meant toppling the elected prime ministers of Italy and Greece and replacing them with Eurocrats (respectively a former European Commissioner and a former vice president of the European Central Bank — two perfect specimens of the people who caused the crisis in the first place). They were prepared to pay any price to keep the euro together — or, more precisely, to expect their peoples to pay, since EU employees are generally exempt from national taxation.

  • How expensive will a Euro bank bailout be? Keep in mind that at one point during the 2008 meltdown, Morgan Stanley owed Uncle Sam $107 billion. With a B. For one bank.
  • In the mid-1990s, Bulgaria got a good look at a currency meltdown first-hand. They only recovered by adopting a currency board for the Lev (which is exactly what Steve H. Hanke and Kurt Schuler had suggested in 1991.)
  • The British Foreign office is already planning for a Euro collapse.
  • A general strike shuts down Portugal.
  • Finally, one Irish commentator puts things in purely mercenary terms:

    The only beneficiaries of the State’s assumption of [Anglo Irish Bank]’s liabilities are taxpayers in the countries whose banks were the reckless lenders to Anglo. Anglo, for all the guff at the time of the bank guarantee, had no systemic importance to the Irish economy. Irish taxpayers had no moral or other liability for its debts.

    The sole reason for saving it was the ECB’s insistence that no euro zone bank should fail. Had Anglo failed, the costs would have been borne primarily by European banks and consequently by European taxpayers.

    So the undertaking by the Irish State to stump up €47 billion to pay those private debts is an act of extreme (if extremely demented) euro-altruism. We are Europe’s ragged-trousered philanthropists, bailing out the euro with money we don’t have and that our European partners are kindly lending us at penal interest rates.

    And this single act of insane generosity wipes out every red cent we’ve got from Europe since 1973.

    [snip]

    And for what? For less than nothing. For a moment of panic, a daft notion, a stupid indulgence in bluster and bravado. Some bleary-eyed fools decided, in the middle of the night, that they could bluff the markets by throwing all the chips we might ever have on to the table. It didn’t take long for the markets to realise that their hand contained nothing better than a pair of deuces.

    But the gamble failed for Europe too. There might be some kind of (very expensive) pride in being able to say that little Ireland took the hit to save the euro zone, like the starry-eyed gal who takes a bullet for the outlaw in a corny western. But we saved nothing. All we managed to do was to buy the euro zone leaders more time in which to delude themselves that there was no real crisis.

    • Tags:, , , , , ,
    Posted in Budget, Economics, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Welfare State | No Comments »

    Could All Of Europe Declare Bankruptcy?

    Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

    That’s the option being openly talked about:

    Europe may need to pull a Chapter 11 – a US-style bankruptcy, which would permit a market shutdown and Euro Zone reorganization before reopening for business.

    The EU desperately needs a break from market pressures in order to allow the political apparatus to really gather its forces and finally move Europe and its debt crisis ahead of the curve. Here we are just a couple of weeks after the feeble attempt to apply an EFSF plaster on the problem and we’re already back to Square One: the EU debt crisis has reached the point at which none of the readily available tools or institutions are sufficient to match the magnitude of the crisis. This dictates the need for an out-of-the-box solution.

    EU policy makers played the extend and pretend game for as long as they could – but now the writing is on the wall: popular outrage is on the rise and putting increasing pressure on the political process – as we are seeing increased demonstrations and grass-root activity taking over both the political agenda and the media. And markets are now balking as empty promises and now a real lack of funds are seeing bond yields beginning to spike out of control. The self-reinforcing cycle of downgrades and austerity and recession are taking us to the very brink of a full scale Crisis 2.0.

    Or, alternately, the EU could just jetison all that inconvenient democracy to keep the Ponzi scheme going just a little bit longer, trying to hide the fact that Europe has run out of money.

    Says Walter Russell Mead: “Right now the world’s largest economic bloc is running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

    So how could Europe possibly display the terminal bankruptcy of the high tax, high spending, highly unionized, cradle-to-grave welfare state, European/Blue State social model? How about if EU staffers went on strike?

    Dear Greek Citizens: I hope you weren’t so foolish as to believe that the Swiss bank accounts containing the money you earned actually belong to you, do you? You’re going to have to return them to Greek banks so we can steal them. Love, the EU.

    The Euro may have been great for Greek elites, but not necessarily great for average Greeks.

    How are things in the rest of Europe? In Spain, unemployment is 22.6%.

    The EU may crack before the Euro.

    China is not coming to the rescue, as China is suffering from the same demographic maladies afflicting Europe: “A population that is no longer growing very fast and is quickly aging. The proportion of the population that depends on the state for pensions and medical care is overwhelming the proportion that works and pays taxes to the state.”

    Plus, Chinese rating agencies just downgraded Greek debt.

    The IMF has quitely changed its rules to make it easier to bail out Europe. With your tax dollars.

    (Hat tips: Ace, Insta, and the usual suspects.)

    Tags:, , , , , ,
    Posted in Budget, Economics, Welfare State | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for October 25, 2011

    Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

    Have a nice cup of randomness:

  • Post-Gadhafi Libya will be run as an Islamic state under Sharia law. Thanks a lot for that great foreign policy triumph, Obama.
  • This Islamsists also came out on top in the election in Tunisia. Maybe the Arab Spring version of democracy will turn out to be the same kind that came to Post-Colonial Africa in the 50s and 60s: One Man, One Vote, Once. Liberals were big cheerleaders then, too.
  • Mickey Kaus points out that propping up public sector employment is a lousy idea even in Keynesian. But it’s a great idea if you want to keep Democrats in power as part of an ever-expanding government, thus providing even more opportunities for graft and kickbacks, as well as back-scratching campaign contributions from public sector unions. Which is probably the real reason Matthew Yglesias is so gung-ho for the idea. Or, as Alpha commenter Peter Schaeffer notes below Yglesias’ original post: “This isn’t about stimulating the economy, but providing slop to the public sector trade unions that dominate the Democratic party.”
  • NPR host fired for overtly acting as a liberal mouthpiece rather than covertly. Which is why the host of All Things Dismembered stepped down because of her husband’s job with the Obama campaign. Maybe NPR staffers need a refresher on their “We all work for the Democratic Party, but here’s how to hide it” orientation course…
  • Why people are moving to the South: “Ask transplanted business owners and they’ll tell you they like investing in states where union bosses and trial lawyers don’t run the show, and where tax burdens are low. They also want a work force that is affordable and well-trained. And that doesn’t see them as the enemy.”

    • Tags:, , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Budget, Democrats, Economics, Jihad, Media Watch, Welfare State | 1 Comment »

    Scenes from the EuroZone Summit

    Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

    There have been high level Euro rescue talks going on all weekend. How are they faring? Not well.

    Just when the eurozone governments thought it could not get worse for Europe’s single currency, it did.

    Shell-shocked EU finance ministers meeting in Brussels on Saturday were already reeling from the worst Franco-German rift for over 20 years and a fractious failure to resolve the problems that have brought Greece, and the euro, close to the brink.

    But then a new bombshell hit as a joint report by the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that, without a default, the Greek debt crisis alone could swallow the EuroZone’s entire €440 billion bailout fund – leaving nothing to spare to help the affected banks of Italy, Spain or France.

    Of course, the problem with following this story from abroad is how the news of the summit gets distorted like some intercontinental game of telephone, especially when filtered through the dulcet-toned hearing aids of welfare state boosters. Thus this overly enthusiastic piece in left-wing newspaper The Guardian, citing that a deal was near based on unnamed “EU diplomats” becomes this blipvert in the left-wing Daily Beast stating that a deal had been reached, becomes this Fark thread in which clueless liberals crow that no one should ever have doubted the soundness of either the Euro or the glorious European welfare state. And also that ratings agencies are evil.

    And yet, as of right now, this “done deal” to rescue the Euro has yet to materialize. How strange!

    Somehow, how France (a country running a a $90+ billion dollar budget deficit) and Germany (a country whose ruling party has lost every local election since it started shoveling money down the Greek bailout chute), were to magically comes up with some €1.6 trillion Euros (the difference between the current bailout fund and the super-sized fund required to backstop the Euro following the inevitable Greek default) is nowhere specified. After all, it was hard enough for Chancellor Angela Merkel to get Germany’s contribution to the fund boosted from €123 billion to €211 billion in the first place.

    As a result of all this happy, confident talk of how the Euro will never be allowed to falter? Moody’s downgraded Spain’s credit rating. They also threatened to do the same for France, especially if they decided to throw more taxpayer money into the Greek debt maw.

    The Good Ship Europe bears its load of bailout guarantees straight for the center of the Greek Debt crisis.

    And if you’re the EU, how do you prevent your debt from being downgraded? A.) Stop borrowing so much, B.) Increase your emergency reserves, or C.) Make it illegal for bond rating companies to downgrade your debt?

    Yeah, that will work.

    How badly awry has the Eruo project gone? The problem with this Hoover Institute piece on is what not to quote from it:

    The champions of the European Union once touted it as a “bold new experiment in living” and “the best hope in an insecure age.” But these days “fear is coursing through the corridors of Brussels,” as the B.B.C. reported in September. Such fear is justified, for the nations of Europe are struggling with fiscal problems that challenge the integrity of the whole E.U.-topian ideal. Greece teetering on the brink of default on its debts, E.U. nations squabbling about how to deal with the crisis, debt levels approaching 100 percent of GDP even in economic-powerhouse countries like Germany and France, and European banks exposed to depreciating government bonds are some of the signposts on the road to decline.

    A monetary union comprising independent states, each with its own peculiar economic and political interests, histories, cultural norms, laws, and fiscal systems, was bound to end up in the current crisis. All that borrowed money, however, was necessary for funding the lavish social welfare entitlements and employment benefits that once impressed champions of the “European Dream.” Yet, despite the greater fiscal integration created by the E.U., sluggish, over-regulated, over-taxed economies could not generate enough money to pay for such amenities. Now, the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, admits, “We can’t finance our social model.”

    This financial crisis means the government-financed dolce vita lifestyle once brandished as a reproach to work-obsessed America is facing cutbacks and austerity programs immensely unpopular among Europeans otherwise used to amenities like France’s 35-hour work week, or Greece’s two extra months of pay, or England’s generous housing subsidies that cost $34.4 billion a year. No surprise, then, that from Athens’ Syntagma Square to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, austerity measures attempting to scale back government spending have been met with strikes, demonstrations, boycotts, and protests, some violent, on the part of citizens for whom such government entitlements have become human rights. In fact, such transfers of wealth have been formalized as rights in Articles 34 and 35 of the E.U.’s Charter of Fundamental Human Rights.

    The Euro crises will likely lead to another recession in the U.S. That is, if you think we ever came out of the Obama recession in the first place, which we didn’t.

    Europe’s private sector shrank for the first time in two years last month.

    Again: The question of a Eurozone collapse is not “if,” it is “when.” And how much of the losses European banks can put taxpayers on the hook for.

    Tags:, , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Economics, Foreign Policy, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 1 Comment »

    “Greece is not salvagable”

    Friday, September 30th, 2011

    That’s the rather bracing judgment from this Stratfor overview of Greece’s problem. Moreover, they’re saying that about its existence as a nation-state, even absent the European debt crises. Also: “Greece has to be kicked out of the Eurozone if the Eurozone is to survive.” Problem? They don’t have enough “firebreak” funds to do it. “Until the Europeans have 2 trillion Euro in funding stashed away, they can’t kick Greece out of the system.”

    I’m not sure I share the pessimism about Greece in the long run. After all, nation-states can exist for an awful long time, despite crappy conditions (see, for example, Haiti). Of course, that assumes that a newly Islamic Turkey doesn’t decide to settle old scores by conquering them outright. (Assuming, of course, that Turkey is still predominately Turkish rather than Kurdish. Claire Berlinski is a little more sanguine about that prospect.)

    Honestly, of the two, I think Greece will outlast the Eurozone by a good measure. The question isn’t the whether Eurocrats can prevent the Eurozone from breaking up, but rather how long they can delay the inevitable, how much sovereign debt can they put taxpayers on the hook for, and how much harder will the inevitable market correction be when it comes? It seems to be a race between how much European taxpayer money can be wasted propping up Europe’s bankrupt welfare states vs. how much of American taxpayer money can the Obama administration waste channeling payouts to well-connected Democratic cronies. The Eurocrats may be winning the race to insolvency, if only due to the lack of a European Tea Party.

    In other Euro Debt Crises news:

  • Europe votes to throw more money down the rat hole.
  • But don’t take that as any kind of victory for the Euro. Quite the opposite. “The furious debate over the erosion of German fiscal sovereignty and democracy – as well as the escalating costs of the EU rescue machinery – has made it absolutely clear that the Bundestag will not prop up the ruins of monetary union for much longer. Horst Seehofer, the leader of Bavaria’s Social Christians, said his party would go ‘this far, and no further’.”
  • Greece passes the tax increase the Eurocrats say is necessary to stave off default.
  • How broke is Europe? They’re considering a tax on every financial transaction. This is great news…for stock exchanges outside of Europe.
  • How Charles de Gaulle foresaw the Euro crackup.
  • The German finance minister says that a leveraged Euro-TARP is dead. I would say why U.S. regulators were pushing such a scheme was puzzling, except of course it isn’t. The goal is to put off the Euro-collapse until after the 2012 elections.
  • Meanwhile, liberal moneybags mastermind George Soros says that the Euro crises is dragging us toward another depression. His solution? I know you’re going to be shocked, shocked to learn that it’s bigger, more central government. “The governments of the eurozone must agree in principle on a new treaty creating a common treasury for the eurozone. In the meantime, the major banks must be put under the direction of the European Central Bank.” To be followed shortly thereafter by the formation of the First European Airborne Swine Squadron.

    • Is there any other place desperate Eurocrats can get money to prop up their falling welfare states? Are they perhaps hoping that Obama will bail them out? After all, what’s a few more trillions in unsupported debt between friends?

    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Budget, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »

    More Greek Default Rumblings

    Sunday, September 25th, 2011

    Actually, less rumblings than the roar of an approaching train. And since I temporarily seem to be ahead of the latest Ace of Spades Doom roundup, I’m going to try and give you a nice clear view of the coming crash.

    “No longer a question of if, but when – that is the tone of discussions over Greece which has dominated the summit of finance ministers in Washington over the weekend.” Former Britain’s former finance minister Alistair Darling agrees, calling default “only a matter of time.”

    The talk now is of how to put in a “firewall” to prevent the contagion of an inevitable Greek default from spreading throughout the European banking system.

    The Euroskeptics have been completely vindicated:

    Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse.

    I think at this point UK residents should be feeling vrey glad indeed that they didn’t abandon the Pound for the Euro.

    Bret Stephens talks about the long line of deceit and fraud that lead Europe to the current crises. “What is now happening in Europe isn’t so much a crisis as it is an exposure: a Madoff-type event rather than a Lehman one.”

    Mark Steyn, using the ever popular music and political metaphor gambit, compares the breakup of the Eurozone with the breakup of R.E.M. while bringing the usual Steyn goodness: “Attempting to postpone the Club Med welfare junkies’ rendezvous with self-extinction will destabilize internal German politics (which always adds to the gaiety of nations).” And this:

    As its own contribution to the end of the world as we know it, the Obama administration has just released a document called “Living Within Our Means and Investing in the Future: The President’s Plan for Economic Growth and Deficit Reduction.” If you’re curious about the first part of the title — “Living Within Our Means” — Veronique de Rugy pointed out at National Review that under this plan debt held by the public will grow from just over $10 trillion to $17.7 trillion by 2021. In other words, the president’s definition of “Living Within Our Means” is to burn through the equivalent of the entire German, French, and British economies in new debt between now and the end of the decade. You can try this yourself next time your bank manager politely suggests you should try “living within your means”: Tell him you’ve got an ingenious plan to get your spending under control by near doubling your present debt in the course of a mere decade. He’s sure to be impressed.

    Germany is near the limit of their willingness to bail out Greece.

    There may even be a taxpayer revolt brewing in the Aegean.

    And if the other PIIGS are doing better than Greece, it is only a matter of degrees: “Italy is the new Lebanon, Portugal the new Venezuela, Spain the new Vietnam, Ireland the new Argentina and nothing is more risky than Greece, according to today’s credit default swap market.”

    But it’s not just Greece and Europe that are hitting the wall. China’s housing bubble may finally be bursting. Worse still: “growth in China may be zero [and] China has ‘European kind of numbers’ when it comes to debt.”

    And the Chinese housing bubble isn’t just affecting China. It’s also affecting Canada.

    And at least one observer has drawn parallels to a certain hopemonger currently residing in the White House:

    Obama has no intention of really solving the debt crisis. And that brings us back to Greece. That government has been doing the same thing for a decade and the chickens have now come home to roost. Greece’s debt is 150 percent of its Gross Domestic Product. Our debt has just reached 100 percent of GDP and the debt is accumulating faster than it ever has. If we were looking out the windshield down the road, we could see the crash that’s just up around the bend.

    But rather than put on the brakes, the president has chosen to pick a fight with the other passengers in the car he is driving. Talk about distracted driving! He is gambling that this fight will convince the passengers to let him stay behind the wheel for another four years. But we certainly can’t wait that long. He’s turned up the radio in hopes we won’t hear the ambulance sirens.

    It looks like its going to be another rough week for world markets…

    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Budget, Economics, Foreign Policy, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 1 Comment »

    Still More Riot Fallout

    Monday, August 15th, 2011

    A few more reactions to the London riots:

    First up is Peter Hitchens:

    I am not really very sorry for the elite liberal Londoners who have suddenly discovered what millions of others have lived with for decades.

    The mass criminality in the big cities is merely a speeded-up and concentrated version of life on most large estates – fear, intimidation, cruelty, injustice, savagery towards the vulnerable and the different, a cold sneer turned towards any plea for pity, the awful realisation that when you call for help from the authorities, none will come.

    Just look and see how many shops are protected with steel shutters, how many homes have bars on their windows. This is not new.

    As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally.

    No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years – the policies they love – have been a terrible mistake.

    (Hat tip: John Derbyshire at NRO.)

    Second is the indomitable Mark Steyn, who brings his usual pith to bear:

    The news shows were filled with scenes of London ablaze, as gangs of feral youths trashed and looted their own neighborhoods. Several readers wrote to taunt me for not having anything to say on the London riots. As it happens, Chapter Five of my book is called “The New Britannia: The Depraved City.” You have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat me to Western Civilization’s descent into barbarism. Anyone who’s read it will fully understand what’s happening on the streets of London. The downgrade and the riots are part of the same story: Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances but its human capital, too….The London rioters are the children of dependency, the progeny of Big Government: they have been marinated in “stimulus” their entire lives….

    One-fifth of children are raised in homes in which no adult works – in which the weekday ritual of rising, dressing and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. One-tenth of the adult population has done not a day’s work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997.

    If you were born into such a household, you’ve been comprehensively “stimulated” into the dead-eyed zombies staggering about the streets this past week: pathetic inarticulate subhumans unable even to grunt the minimal monosyllables to BBC interviewers desperate to appease their pathologies. C’mon, we’re not asking much: just a word or two about how it’s all the fault of government “cuts” like the leftie columnists argue. And yet even that is beyond these baying beasts. The great-grandparents of these brutes stood alone against a Fascist Europe in that dark year after the fall of France in 1940. Their grandparents were raised in one of the most peaceful and crime-free nations on the planet. Were those Englishmen of the mid-20th century to be magically transplanted to London today, they’d assume they were in some fantastical remote galaxy. If Charlton Heston was horrified to discover the Planet of the Apes was his own, Britons are beginning to realize that the remote desert island of “Lord Of The Flies” is, in fact, located just off the coast of Europe in the northeast Atlantic. Within two generations of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, a significant proportion of the once-free British people entrusted themselves to social rewiring by liberal compassionate Big Government and thereby rendered themselves paralytic and unemployable save for nonspeaking parts in “Rise of The Planet Of The Apes.” And even that would likely be too much like hard work.

    Third, the redoubtable Theodore Dalrymple weighs in again on the appalling state of British youth:

    In Britain nowadays, the difference between ordinary social life and riot is only a matter of degree, not of type…

    If the authorities show neither the will nor the capacity to deal with such an easily solved problem—and willfully do all they can to worsen it—is it any wonder that they exhibit, in the face of more difficult problems, all the courage and determination of frightened rabbits?

    The rioters in the news last week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that has been assiduously cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and bureaucrats. “We’re fed up with being broke,” one rioter was reported as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one’s desires were a human right rather than something to be earned.

    But while the rioters have been maintained in a condition of near-permanent unemployment by government subvention augmented by criminal activity, Britain was importing labor to man its service industries. You can travel up and down the country and you can be sure that all the decent hotels and restaurants will be manned overwhelmingly by young foreigners; not a young Briton in sight (thank God).

    The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.

    The icing on the cake, as it were, is that social charges on labor and the minimum wage are so high that no employer can possibly extract from the young unemployed Briton anything like the value of what it costs to employ him. And thus we have the paradox of high youth unemployment at the very same time that we suck in young workers from abroad.

    Speaking of Dalrymple, the folks behind The Skeptical Doctor, a site dedicated to his writings, dropped me a line, and their site is well worth pursuing for those who can’t get enough Dalrymple, and for anyone interested in what lead the UK to it’s current state (among many other topics).

    Remember, looters are “disenfranchised members of the working class” but Tea Party protesters are bigots.

    Finally, in what may be vestigial traces of a spine, British courts have been ordered to ignore the usual sentencing guidelines and actually send rioters to jail.

    Tags:, , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Crime, Welfare State | 1 Comment »

    J. G. Ballard and the London Riots

    Saturday, August 13th, 2011

    You may know that I have another, non-political blog, mostly on topics like science fiction, book collecting, movies, etc. But every now and then a piece comes along that could fit on either blog, such as this Andrew Fox piece on J. G. Ballard’s works and the London riots.

    Having been interned as a child in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II (the source of Empire of the Sun), Ballard has always been interested in what happens when you strip the veneer of civilization away. Much of Fox’s piece concerns Ballard’s later novels, which I have not read, “all of which feature middle class professionals either diving into or being pulled into revolutionary, nihilistic violence due to ennui, boredom, or a cancerlike consumerism which has replaced religion and patriotism at the center of their psyche.” (Though I have a number of Ballard first editions, I’m still catching up on the reading them, having just finished The Crystal World earlier this year.) Ballard’s penultimate novel, Millennium People, evidently features “middle class professionals in suburban London instigating terrorism and revolution in an effort to shock a sense of meaning back into their lives.” Which does tie rather neatly into the London riots of the last week…

    Also, I must have missed this Theodore Dalrymple piece on Ballard.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

    Tags:, , , , , , ,
    Posted in Crime, Welfare State | No Comments »

    Loot a Store, Lose Your House

    Friday, August 12th, 2011

    At least if it’s a taxpayer-subsidized flat in the UK.

    In the first case of its kind, Daniel Sartain-Clarke, 18, and his mother have been served with an eviction notice as council bosses seek to turf them out of their £225,000 taxpayer-subsidised flat.

    Sartain-Clarke is charged with violent disorder and attempting to steal electronic goods from the Currys store at Clapham Junction, South London, on Monday night.

    I think if the UK were to implement a policy that anyone caught looting would be kicked off all government benefits (the dole, housing, NHS, etc.) for life, I believe you’d see the last of rioting there for a very long time.

    Tags:, , , , , ,
    Posted in Crime, Welfare State | No Comments »

    « Older Entries
    Newer Entries »