“The EU is our biggest trading partner. We cannot afford to let it fail. We send much of our goods and services to Europe. We share their values. We want to crush Iran with our European pals. They bomb and regulate the world with us. If the Eurozone goes down in flames; if we let them—we’ll be next.” So said President Barack Obama on November 28. Well, sort of. (Okay, I’ve ad-libbed a LOT, but I think I know my president by now.)
The stakes are too high, you say? For whom, Mr. President? Cui Bono? Who Benefits, Barack?
Ask yourself that question each time you hear a reporter/pundit/analyst/politician insist that the EU and the Euro zone cannot be allowed to fail.
In reply to the question as to what will happen if this colossus collapses, the stakeholders above parrot a bunch of non sequiturs or circular arguments. In the tradition of “a statement that does not follow logically from what preceded it,” these reasons don’t necessarily obtain:
We can’t allow the thing to fail because the stakes are too high. Again: For whom?
David Böcking of Spiegel Online (a most intelligent newspaper; the Germans are impressive) advances the arguments against the break-up of the Eurozone. These are mostly legalistic, and are not rooted in real economic realities. The treaties, observes Böcking, don’t allow for easy disengagement. Legal disputes could arise over debt owed if the seceding country had borrowed money. And, mostly, sinecured EU official would lose sway on the world stage.
Brace for impact, if you believed these bastards, but here are the economic realities:
We flesh-and-blood Americans trade not with Barack or with Brussels, the seat of the European central government, but rather with the people of Belgium, the Netherland, Germany, France. If the financial institutions into which Europeans and Americans have been herded by bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic collapse, well then, individual producers and traders will find a way to make a living without these artificial, inorganic structures.
This is a failure of government, not of all the people, although some of the governed, maybe even the majority, have failed. The people who’ve failed are those who have eaten the state’s forbidden fruit.
If I hear the likes of Michele Bachmann demand that we pay homage to a wonderful country and thank our lucky stars for the wages we are allowed to work for, I’ll hit the roof. If you want to be thankful on Thanksgiving, it is not “The Country” collective—whatever that means—that you should thank. A country is a composite of individuals. To the extent that a preponderance of Americans practice a respect for America’s founding documents—to that extent the collective will reflect this country’s great philosophy. Sadly, the number of individuals who practice our wonderful American creed is diminishing daily.
William Bradford was the governor of the original Pilgrim colony, founded at Plymouth in 1621. The colony was first organized on a communal basis, as their financiers required. Land was owned in common. The Pilgrims farmed communally, too, following the “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” precept.
The results were disastrous. Communism didn’t work any better 400 years ago than it does today. By 1623, the colony had suffered serious losses. Starvation was imminent.
Bradford realized that the communal system encouraged and rewarded waste and laziness and inefficiency, and destroyed individual initiative. Desperate, he abolished it. He distributed private plots of land among the surviving Pilgrims, encouraging them to plant early and farm as individuals, not collectively.
The results: a bountiful early harvest that saved the colonies. After the harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated with a day of Thanksgiving — on August 9th.
Unfortunately, William Bradford’s diaries — in which he recorded the failure of the collectivist system and the triumph of private enterprise — were lost for many years. When Thanksgiving was later made a national holiday, the present November date was chosen. And the lesson the Pilgrims so painfully learned was, alas, not made a part of the holiday.
Happily, Bradford’s diaries were later rediscovered. They’re available today in paperback. They tell the real story of Thanksgiving — how private property and individual initiative saved the Pilgrims.
This Thanksgiving season, one of the many things I’m thankful for is our free market system (imperfectly realized as it is). And I’m also grateful that there are increasing numbers of Americans who are learning the importance of free markets, and who are working to replace government coercion with marketplace cooperation here in America and around the world.
Juxtapose the truth with the official historical version of the Thanksgiving celebration.
Omitted from the suspects lined-up in my WND column, “Fox News And Its Truth Deniers,” was U.S. Representative for New York’s 15th congressional district, Charlie Rangel. A more repulsive character to make himself at home on the “dueling perspectives political panel” would be hard to come by. A moral vacuum would open up, says Rangel, if the streets are swept clean of the Occupy Wall Street human and other detritus. Rangel apparently thinks that blocking access to the subway and disrupting business, which is what’s afoot, amounts to speech. Is this the opposite of edifying or what?
“The dueling perspectives political panel is compatible with the aims of CNN, MSNBC, and the other progressive broadcasters. Here is how it works: You invite a member of the Republican establishment; often a RINO—preferably a bimbo—to do battle with a lefty from similar circles. The sides are ideologically so close, that, in all likelihood, the panelists hang out after the show.
This format is positively postmodernist. Why? Because, by presenting the public with two competing perspectives—you mislead viewers into believing that indeed there are two realities, and that it is up to them to decide which one is more compelling.
The one parallel universe is represented on Fox Business by the likes of Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne, and others. …
The philosophical filth spewed by such characters – almost nightly on freedom-promoting programing, no less – is that government can spend and lend to good effect; that it can tax without discouraging and disrupting production; and that our overlords in D.C. can regulate “better” (read energy-squandering) industries into being by steering capital and labor away from bad (energy-efficient) industries (oil and gas). …
The truth is that truth is immutable, never relative. The little truth there is in mainstream media should not be diluted or presented by its adherents as dueling with untruth.
The above Fox News fixtures no more represent truth or promote it than does your average Holocaust denier.
With an exception: Libraries have long since engaged in a robust debate as to how to classify Holocaust-denying literature. While admirably advocating for unfettered free access, Professor of Library Services John A. Drobnicki has suggested moving Holocaust denial out of the History section in US libraries and closer to the ‘Bigfoot books,’ so that Holocaust denial’s Dewey Decimal designation is with ‘hoax materials.’
Indeed, hacks are not historians. Although the dueling-perspectives panel format would suggest it is—the economic bunk spewed by the likes of Skinner, Heldman, Dowdell, Jeffers, Sibila, and Erika Payne is no version of the truth, but a perversion of it.” …
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UPDATE I (Nov. 18): MSNBC has just inaugurated the nauseating “NOW,” which utilizes the dueling-perspectives panel discussed in my WND column to great effect. Here is the little RINO Lolita S. E. Cupp making a weak case for the right of a man to hire a lawyer, in a pathologically litigious country, which jails more individuals than any other: the USA. By “a weak case,” the hallmark of an establishment Republican (or whatever one chooses to dub this political species), I mean that grimaces, gestures, and a paraphrasing of the host replace serious argument. In particular, earlier in the debate, Cupp picked up on a catchy phrase the host had used, and repeated it again and again (“precipice politics) in order to conceal her vacuity. In the loud talking (for it wasn’t intelligent debate) about the Super Committee, Naomi Wolf was the only individual to zero in on the issue of a soviet-style politburo making decisions in a so-called representative democracy. (Wolf didn’t put it this way, but she made the point effectively. And, of course, the US was supposed to be a republic, not a mobocracy.) Otherwise, everything is all very friendly and flirty.
UPDATE II:Via Facebook: What uncharacteristic intellectual pettiness it is to zero in on a trivial convention used in the column, instead of addressing the issue of natural law and reality, also the core of the column. This is what the column is about. However, maybe some here disagree that “truth is immutable, never relative.” And that “the little truth there is in mainstream media should not be diluted or presented by its adherents as dueling with untruth.”
UPDATE III: LEFT-LIBERTARIANISM. To the “there is nothing wrong with Judge and Stossel” crowd: ‘Cmon: They are the best we have, but there is plenty wrong. They are left-libertarians. For a while, Paul was teetering there too, but was pulled back from the brink by the conservatism of the his base, the majority of whom do not think that, at 1 million a year, the US needs more immigration and that anchor babies are dictated by the Constitution.
