America currently has the worst political class in its history. But if Europe doesn’t, it’s only because of how very bad it’s been in the past.
|
|||||
|
June 20th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 [Greek government policy is] known as ‘drinking your way back to sobriety’. The deficit spending the Greek government wants to do is almost-entirely suppressive or neutral to GDP – it is spending by government, for government, on government. The population is shrinking, their internal revenue picture is already dreadful and only getting worse (because they have the worst ratio of producers to consumers of tax funding in the civilized world, and getting worser) and the only way any government of Greece can survive and keep the mayhem in the streets down to acceptable levels is to restore the drunken-sailor approach to public spending that got them into trouble in the first place. This means 14 monthly pension checks a year, retirement at 50 for workers in hazardous trades like hairdressing, and all the other 1,001 ways they managed to bankrupt themselves already. – Serial commenter llamas June 18th, 2012 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Who do you hope wins the election in Greece today? As a starting point for discussion, I thought the headline of this Guardian article “A Syriza victory will mark the beginning of the end of Greece’s tragedy” might well turn out to be true if Syriza do win, albeit not in the way the left wing authors expect. June 17th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Could Brussels have been taken over by saboteurs, a secret army of eurosceptic infiltrators and spies masquerading as officials? I only ask because it now almost seems as if Spain’s bailout was deliberately designed not merely to fail but to inflict maximum damage on the Spanish economy and the entire Eurozone. Rarely have I seen such incompetence. June 14th, 2012 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
A thing I keep banging on about is that a crucial stage in an argument occurs when the burden of proof gets reversed. Crackpot Theorists devise a Crackpot Theory. It unites them. It excites them. It excuses their shared belief that The Free Market Is Not Good Enough. They demand action from each other. They capture small parts of government departments that most people don’t give a damn about. They write small laws and get them passed. A few Critics notice, and start explaining that the Crackpot Theory is, maybe, a crackpot theory. The Crackpot Theorists say: No it isn’t! The Critics say: But you are making bad decisions! The Crackpot Theorists say: No we aren’t! As this phase of the argument gets seriously going, the Critics become ever more convinced that the Crackpot Theorists are indeed Crackpot Theorists, and because the Crackpot Theorists are behaving like the maniacal Crackpot Theorists that they are, the Critics grow in number, and in their certainty that the Crackpot Theorists are totally crackpot. The small bits of the government departments grow into big bits, and infect other bits. The laws they introduce get bigger and more intrusive. But sadly, nobody else cares, or not enough to stop all this. The money and inconvenience involved is still trivial, by the usual standards of government-imposed expense and inconvenience. Let the Crackpot Theorists have their fun! And besides: Maybe, just maybe, the Crackpot Theorists are onto something. Better safe than sorry! Anyway, what can you do? As the Crackpot Theory grows in power, powerless people start to notice and to cry out: Your Crackpot Theory is just an excuse for us to be taxed more! Alas, for many people this is a feature, not a bug. Throughout this phase of the history of the Crackpot Theory, the Critics of the Crackpot Theory are in the impossible position of having only one way of stopping the rise to prominence of the Crackpot Theory, which is to convince the Crackpot Theorists that they are wrong. Some Crackpot Theorists are convinced. Quite a few of them creep away in ashamed silence. A tiny few even say in public that they were wrong. But others of them are now so wholly dependent for their livelihoods upon the Crackpot Theory being true that they stick with it anyway, despite now suspecting or even knowing what total crackpottery it is. What can they do? Until, one day, the Crackpot Theorists pick a fight with a group of people powerful enough for their anger to actually matter, to the entire world. At which point, the burden of proof, hitherto weighing down only upon the shoulders of the Critics, now descends upon the shoulders of the Crackpot Theorists themselves. Suddenly, they have to convince the world that they are right and that their Critics are wrong. They have to convince their Critics that their Critics are wrong, just to shut their Critics up from saying what the world now wants to be told, namely that the fight with those powerful and angry people is a fight that is not worth having. But our Crackpot Theory says that we must have this fight! No matter what! The world must be saved, even if it is ruined in the process! I’m just thinking aloud, you understand. Having seen this (linked to just now by the ever-alert Instapundit):
Wei Zhenzhong, secretary general of the China Air Transport Association, said:
If that’s not a powerful and angry person threatening a trade war, I don’t know what is. If the trade war duly happens, next up: So, Crackpot Theorists, is your Crackpot Theory true enough to be worth stuff like this? Go ahead. Convince us. June 13th, 2012 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
“By the way, George Soros also warned that the new, creditor-dominated Europe would become “a German empire with the periphery as the hinterland”. Didn’t a certain female politician warn of something along these lines nearly 25 years ago, and wasn’t she branded xenophobic for her pains? An entire generation is being made to pay for our continent’s slow learners.” June 9th, 2012 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you visit, for example, the Financial Times website, you will be presented with a pop-up box warning you about cookies. This is becoming more common and is a result of the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, also known as the e-Privacy Directive, also known as the cookie law, which took effect on 26th May. Since no-one understands the law and has to rely on vague guidance that gets updated without really clarifying anything, web designers who have heard of the law will likely rely on the annoying pop-up box for some time and it will become boilerplate which is instinctively dismissed by users. Luckily most web designers seemingly have not heard of the law or are otherwise ignoring it, probably because they have real work to get on with. Dave Evans of the Information Commissioner’s Office writes:
Freely co-operating organisations did solve the problem years ago, when they invented web browsers with cookie settings. This legislation solves nothing at the cost of confusing, worrying and irritating people. June 6th, 2012 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Being on the Cobden Centre email list is a constant source of interesting news items and opinions, in addition to all the stuff that is none of your business and not really any of mine. Today, for instance, someone provided a link to this blog posting, which is entitled “CRASH 2: Why has the Treasury revoked debt-trading sections of a 1939 Act – without telling Parliament?” and is subtitled “How a hidden order could be used to bankrupt the UK”. Quote:
The gist of this particular quiet little alteration being that it just got easier for Britain to bale out the banks of various other countries which are now part of the EU. It’s all to do with “negotiable instruments”. In response, someone else on the Cobden Centre list sent the text of a Reuters story, which I found in a linkable form here. Quote:
And not only Germany, it would seem. As to whether the story behind link number one really is link number two, I don’t know. But I have long believed that the European Union, when it finally collapses, will do so all at once. All the power and all the money that these fanatics have under their control will all be used up, all of it, to sustain the illusion that they are all now so determined to sustain. And then all the power and all the money will be gone, and everything will very suddenly disintegrate. At which point it will emerge that everyone was only obeying orders. May 29th, 2012 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
In all the discussion about the Greek exit from the Euro I see a lot about wealth and poverty; about whether more damage would be done to the economies of Greece, Europe and the world by “austerity” within the Euro versus a default and a return to the drachma. These are the questions of cost and benefit that it is respectable for world leaders to discuss. Discussion gets heated, I hear – voices are raised and cheeks flushed with anger. But the thing that really sends the blood rushing to a Prime Minister or a Chancellor’s cheek is pride, not money. Pride matters. Pride, shame and “face” in the oriental sense set billions of Euros coursing this way and that in a way that mere economics could never manage. Greek pride finds German diktats hard to bear – but not so unbearable as facing the fact that Greece did not join the Euro but rather was let in by condescending officials who turned a blind eye to obvious lies, like a university turning a blind eye to plagiarism in order to keep up the diversity quota. The Germans were proud of their Deutschmark, prouder still of their own nobility in giving it up for the greater good (with a little frisson of shame at the sinful pleasures of that export boom), and this is the thanks they get? Bitterest of all is the wounded pride of the Eurocrats. Their sure touch was meant to gently shape history as the potter’s touch shapes the clay. Only the clay slid off-balance on the wheel and it has begun the trajectory that will end when it hits the wall with an almighty SPLAT. Shapers of history really hate almighty splats. Hurts their pride, you see. I really hate shapers of history. May 21st, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
This article on Greeks seeking refuge from their woes by emigrating to Australia is a bit old now, although I would be very surprised if the desire to go has changed at all. Greeks are now, by one measure I saw, the seventh largest ethnic grouping Down Under. Of course, countries such as Australia and Canada, for that matter, might not be as easy to emigrate to as in the past if the would-be emigrant does not have the sort of skills that are likely to appeal to any granters of visas. And without wishing to sound sour about it, I could argue that the sort of enterprising Greeks who would have been welcomed with open arms by such countries have left their ancestral homes long ago. Another problem is that the very people who are trying to get the hell out of Greece are likely to be the sort most likely to drive their country back towards some semblance of prosperity. Update: EU officials are starting to admit they are planning for a Greek exit. The end of Greece’s eurozone membership is very close now, I think. May 18th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
This would have made a good Samizdata quote of the day, but as that slot has already been grabbed, here I give you this item about the end-times for the euro:
May 14th, 2012 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
