In 1965, government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 28% in Western Europe. Today it hovers just under 50%. In 1965, the fertility rate in Germany was a healthy 2.5 children per mother. Today it is a catastrophic 1.35. During the postwar years, annual GDP growth in Europe averaged 5.5%. After 1973, it rarely exceeded 2.3%. In 1973, Europeans worked 102 hours for every 100 worked by an American. By 2004 they worked just 82 hours for every 100 American ones.
[…]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. The shock is that it’s a shock. Greece was never going to be bailed out and will, sooner or later, default. The banks holding Greek debt will, sooner or later, be recapitalized. The recapitalization will be borne by German taxpayers, and it will bring them—sooner rather than later—to the outer limit of their forbearance. The Chinese will not ride to the rescue: They know not to throw good money after bad.
And then Italy will go Greek. Europe’s crisis will lap on U.S. shores, and America’s economic woes will lap on Europe’s—a two-way tsunami.
America will survive this because America is a state. But as Bismarck once remarked, “Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong. Europe is a geographical expression.” The “fiscal union” that’s being mooted will never come to pass: German voters won’t stand for it, and neither will any other country that wants to retain fiscal independence—which is to say, the core attribute of democratic sovereignty.
What comes next is the explosion of the European project. Given what European leaders have made of that project over the past 30-odd years, it’s not an altogether bad thing. But it will come at a massive cost. The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. It’s a long, likely parade of horribles.
Wow… things really are bad in Europe. And here, too.
[A] congressional report released last week added another layer of explanation for the abject failure of Obamanomics since 2009. Along with the explosion of federal spending, Obama directed his appointees at key federal departments and agencies to embark on an unprecedented expansion of bureaucratic regulation. Thousands of new bureaucrats were hired at places like the Department of Heath and Human Services and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and legions of costly new regulations soon poured forth.
The report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee headed by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., took aim at Obama’s “regulatory tsunami” and concluded that the pace and scale of new regulations threatens the ability of the government to fulfill even its most basic regulatory functions. Here’s how the congressional panel summarized its conclusions:
“The Obama Administration has created a regulatory environment that is suffocating America’s entrepreneurs’ ability to create jobs and grow businesses, … This regulatory tsunami has caused job creators to lock down at a time when we need them to expand. The committee has found that the problems created by this regulatory tsunami goes far beyond the cost of the regulations themselves, but also include breakdowns in the regulatory process itself that is having a severe impact on large and small businesses alike.”
Specifically, the panel found at least 219 “economically significant regulations in the pipeline, which if finalized, will impose costs of $100 million or more annually on the economy.” That’s a minimum of $219 billion in added costs to do business in this country over the next decade. Even worse, the panel found the Obama bureaucrats have already imposed 75 major new regulations that are projected to add another $380 billion in costs.
The Issa panel concluded that, as a result of this flood of new rules, “the regulatory process is broken” and that it is “being manipulated and exploited in an effort to reward allies of the Obama administration such as environmental groups, trial lawyers and unions.”
All we have to do to screw up this economy is do what the Europeans are doing – and we are.
This Wall Street Journal article provides more insight into why the unionized police did nothing during the UK riots.
Excerpt:
The night before, at approximately 9:30 p.m., between 30 and 40 teenagers broke into the shop and left with all its liquor, cigarettes and cash. Mr. Raif, his brother and a handful of customers were inside at the time.
“I saw them coming and started to lock the doors, but they kicked through the glass and forced the doors open. All the customers ran to the back and my brother called the police,” he recalls.
[…]Once inside, the looters snatched six-packs of Supermalt from the shelves nearest the entrance and hurled them at the cigarette and alcohol cases behind the register. They appeared to be 16 or younger and sober to Mr. Raif. He doesn’t know if they were kids from the neighborhood, but despite their hoods and balaclavas he could tell “from their hands” that his looters were mostly white.
“They were very shameful. It was a horrible experience.”
The police never did appear, although they followed up nine hours later with a phone call. “Everything we pay here—taxes, rates, rents—it’s all so expensive. And we can’t even get the police when there are people robbing our shop.”
[…]”I’ve been here 12 years,” says the Pakistan native. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
So what’s the problem? Welfare cuts, racist police, the “rich”?
“Please,” he laughs. “We’re all poor.
“Look, my point of view is this: It started in Tottenham, on Saturday, when a man got shot by the police. People protested, and then some people went and burned down a police car. And the police did nothing. They burned down more police cars, they burned down a bus, they burned down a building—and the police did nothing. They needed to respond. Instead the police retreated in Tottenham. So this, whatever you call it, it started as something against the police. The police did not show the strength to push back, and it spread. And that is why I’m out here now like a security guard.”
As we speak, “it” is spreading to Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Wolverhampton. Elsewhere in London, locals have formed vigilante groups and are patrolling their own streets.
Home Secretary Theresa May earlier on Tuesday had defended the government’s use-of-force policies, declaring that “the way we police in Britain is not through use of water cannon. The way we police in Britain is through consent of communities.”
Perhaps if the police had been privatized, and had to please customers in order to get paid, then this would not have happened. But the market forces of choice and competition are nowhere to be found when government has a monopoly on some service. Taxes are deducted automatically, and you get the service they provide. They have no incentive to risk their necks for you – they get paid regardless. If they want a raise, then they go on strike.
Now where do you suppose that this disdain for the use of force against lawlessness came from? Could it be from the secular left, that is so uncomfortable with the ideas of moral standards, moral duties and moral accountability? They have been in power in the UK for over a decade. You may also recall that they have passed many measures opposing private property, self-defense, legal firearm ownership – and weakened prosecution and incarceration of convicted criminals. Bleeding heart liberals just hate the idea that criminals might be shot while committing crimes against law abiding citizens – they don’t want criminals to be frightened by gun-wielding property owners. That’s why they banned hand guns in 1997, leading to a doubling of the violent crime rate in the next four years.
This story reminds me of what happened in Canada a while back, when the police refused to do anything about vandalism committed by the native Canadians. It’s not politically correct to enforce laws against groups who vote for secular leftists, didn’t you know?
If the UK is so secular and socialist, then why are young people rioting? Don’t young people like secularism and socialism? I thought that the enlightened Labour Party would have fixed all the problems of society with their progressive fiscal and social policies over the last decade.
People who are protesting are by nature angry, or at least solemn. They have upraised fists and homemade signs.
But young Britons haven’t even bothered to come up with a slogan or a decent chant. They are blissfully happy as they destroy other people’s property. They are without guilt.
It can be seen in the images of giddy youths hauling flat-screen televisions out of plundered shops. It can be read in the reports where, as one witness described, a young woman looted so many sweaters from a high-end London store she tottered under their weight.
And it can be heard, starkly, in the conversation between a BBC Radio reporter and two women in Croydon who were, at 9: 30 a.m. Tuesday, drinking from a bottle of stolen rosé and talking about their night of adventure.
“Everyone was chucking things, chucking bottles, breaking into stuff,” one said.
“It was good, though; it was madness,” her friend chimed in, giggling about the craziness of it all. The first girl agreed, it was “good fun.”
The reporter asked if they had been drinking all night. “Free alcohol,” one said. Then she caught herself. “It’s the government’s fault, though. The Conservatives. It’s not even a riot. It’s showing the police we can do what we want.”
The reporter gamely tried to crack through the cognitive dissonance she was hearing. These are local people whose shops are being torched, she said. “Why are you targeting your own people?”
“It’s the rich people,” came the explanation. “It’s the people who have all got businesses. That’s why all this is happening, because of the rich people.”
Tell that to the kid, captured on video, who was sitting on the ground with a bleeding nose when someone came to his aid. He was helped up, then had his backpack emptied.
Tell that to the shop owners whose only asset was their inventory and who have lost it all to self-centred, marauding thugs. If only they had known they were “rich,” they might have taken time to enjoy their vast wealth. Instead of, you know, working.
[…]They have convinced themselves someone else is to blame, even if they identify a different culprit in consecutive breaths, and therefore they are off to pillage, loot and burn. If homes are lost to the fires? Blame the rich. Or the police. They started it all, you see.
Does that view sound familiar? Why yes – it’s the view of mainstream Democrats, including Obama and his allies in the news media.
And here’s an article that Mary and Dina sent to me explaining where these amoral children came from.
Excerpt:
An underclass has existed throughout history, which once endured appalling privation. Its spasmodic outbreaks of violence, especially in the early 19th century, frightened the ruling classes.
Its frustrations and passions were kept at bay by force and draconian legal sanctions, foremost among them capital punishment and transportation to the colonies.
Today, those at the bottom of society behave no better than their forebears, but the welfare state has relieved them from hunger and real want.
When social surveys speak of “deprivation” and “poverty”, this is entirely relative. Meanwhile, sanctions for wrongdoing have largely vanished.
[…]But it will not do for a moment to claim the rioters’ behaviour reflects deprived circumstances or police persecution.
Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.
This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect.
It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion which modern society finds unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything different or better.
A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.
Anyone who reproaches a child, far less an adult, for discarding rubbish, making a racket, committing vandalism or driving unsociably will receive in return a torrent of obscenities, if not violence.
So who is to blame? The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass.
The social engineering industry unites to claim that the conventional template of family life is no longer valid.
[…]This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.
The judiciary colludes with social services and infinitely ingenious lawyers to assert the primacy of the rights of the criminal and aggressor over those of law-abiding citizens, especially if a young offender is involved.
The police, in recent years, have developed a reputation for ignoring yobbery and bullying, or even for taking the yobs’ side against complainants.
“The problem,” said Bill Pitt, the former head of Manchester’s Nuisance Strategy Unit, “is that the law appears to be there to protect the rights of the perpetrator, and does not support the victim.”
Police regularly arrest householders who are deemed to have taken “disproportionate” action to protect themselves and their property from burglars or intruders. The message goes out that criminals have little to fear from “the feds”.
Figures published earlier this month show that a majority of “lesser” crimes – which include burglary and car theft, and which cause acute distress to their victims – are never investigated, because forces think it so unlikely they will catch the perpetrators.
[…]A teacher, Francis Gilbert, wrote five years ago in his book Yob Nation: “The public feels it no longer has the right to interfere.”
Discussing the difficulties of imposing sanctions for misbehaviour or idleness at school, he described the case of a girl pupil he scolded for missing all her homework deadlines.
The youngster’s mother, a social worker, telephoned him and said: “Threatening to throw my daughter off the A-level course because she hasn’t done some work is tantamount to psychological abuse, and there is legislation which prevents these sorts of threats.
“I believe you are trying to harm my child’s mental well-being, and may well take steps… if you are not careful.”
That story rings horribly true. It reflects a society in which teachers have been deprived of their traditional right to arbitrate pupils’ behaviour. Denied power, most find it hard to sustain respect, never mind control.
I think that last example explains the root of the problem.
Here’s the chain of causation. First, people get annoyed with the talk of moral values and moral duties that comes from religious people. They don’t want anyone telling them to set boundaries on their pursuit of pleasure.
Agnostic evolutionist Aldous Huxley explains:
I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.
The secular left government is only too happy to push this philosophy of meaninglessness in the public schools. It makes the secular left elites feel good when they undermine the moral standard that religious people use when making judgments. Judgments are bad because they make bad people feel bad about behaving badly. Judgments have to go. And if religion is the ground for moral judgments, then religion has to go. And the public schools can be used to make sure that it does go.
This new view of morality is called “moral relativism”, and it is the official view of the secular left. Basically, if there is no designer of the universe, then there is no way we ought to be. If there is no way we ought to be, then no one has a right to tell anyone how they ought to be. This is the view that the Labour Party enshrined into law, using all the power of the public schools and the state-run media. The position of the secular left is that making people feel bad by judging them is the only real evil left in the world. Just let people do whatever they want, they say – we can always tax the rich and the corporations more to make everyone come out equal in the end.
You may have noticed that my post about Theodore Dalrymple’s book “Life at the Bottom” is back in the top 10 popular posts today. Check out the post – it has links to all the chapters of a free book that explains exactly what the rioters believe, and why. The thesis of the book is that the secular left elites deliberately cause the poor to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, and to prevent anyone from holding them accountable for their own choices. It’s a must-read.
WINTERY KNIGHT 