Land of Moussaka And Moochers

Debt, Economy, EU, Europe, Regulation

Greece is “in a world of its own” when it comes to debt as a percentage of GDP (165%, last I checked). The Greeks’ route to solvency has been … to elect a socialist, Alexis Tsipras, as their new prime minister. DER SPIEGEL summed up their hopes for the future: “… one has the feeling that the Greeks are hoping for a pink elephant that can play drums.”

Athens, like Washington, is corrupt to the core. It continues to spend more than it takes in. Greek labor markets have yet to be liberalized. A high minimum wage impedes hiring. And, by BBC News’s accounting, “a habit of paying a ‘holiday bonus’ equal to one or two months’ extra pay” persists. One need not be a Delphic oracle to divine the next stage in Greece’s unraveling.

Tsipras was asked: “… if the Germans elect a government that refuses all support to Greece, then that is their sovereign decision, right?”
He said: “No, you have to show solidarity, you have obligated yourselves to do so.

Taki Theodoracopulos suggests the following for the survival of Greece: “Most important are structural reforms, not feel-good bullshit. Public sector unions are choking the nation’s economy, whereas the private sector is booming. Starting a business is almost impossible due to bureaucratic blackmails, while overregulation is stifling economic activity. Free the economy and stop protecting cartels, shrink the state, and in five years Greece will be the Switzerland of the south.”

I have a few more suggestions:

Greeks constitute a high-cost and low-efficiency workforce. They cannot compete. Had they a moral and intellectual compass—and were allowed to chart their destinies—the people of Greece would opt to leave the Eurozone and the wider European Union (EU). Greeks could then reclaim their sovereignty. First, by reinstating the drachma, their ancient currency. Next, they could elect to float their exchange rates against those of EU member states so as to increase the appeal of lackluster Greek labor.

UPDATED: Merkel’s Ironic Comment About European ‘Territorial Integrity’ (Ukraine)

EU, Europe, Federalism, Foreign Policy, Nationhood, The State

On the matter of the Ukraine crisis, and in particular, on whether to arm Ukraine, keeping in mind the dangers of “sparking a proxy war with Russia”—German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who met with Barack Obama today, said something rather curious:

Merkel said that abandoning the principle of territorial integrity at the heart of the Ukraine crisis posed a threat to the “peaceful order of Europe”.
“For somebody who comes from Europe, I can only say, if we give up this principle of territorial integrity, we will not be able to maintain the peaceful order of Europe,” she said. “It’s essential.”

Territorial integrity is just about all that remains of European national sovereignty under the Bismarckian suprastate that is the EU.

In the quest to engineer a single European identity, Eurocrats have substituted the nation-state with deracinated, supranational institutions. “The EU already has rights to legislate over external trade and customs policy, the internal market, the monetary policy of countries in the eurozone, agriculture and fisheries and many areas of domestic law including the environment and health and safety at work.” And the EU intends to “extend its rights into … justice policy, especially asylum and immigration,” and harmonize judicial practices.

The rhetoric about the free flow of goods, labor, and capital across borders is as credible as the verbiage about union for peace. The EU has mandated strictly regulated markets, privileging labor interests over those of capital, and instituted oppressive socialist labor laws and “unfair-competition” regulations that have hiked labor costs and resulted in structural unemployment.

Take The Czech Republic. Joseph Sima, associate professor at the Prague School of Economics, described the fate of his country since joining the EU as having gone “From the Bosom of Communism to the Central Control of EU Planners”: There’s the added dead weight of thousands of meddling mandarins, there’s the imperative to change local laws to fit EU decrees; to hike taxes, even liquidate duty free shops. There’s the burden on nascent businesses of prohibitive health and safety standards. (The right to work is not an EU-approved birthright.) There are subsidies and grants of monopoly to farmers. A regime of licenses now restricts entrepreneurial activity and blocks entry into assorted occupations. On hand to subdue any Czechoslovakian Martha Stewart is an army of SEC gendarmes, also by EU edict. As he photocopies his paper, Sima is reminded of the Association of Authors’ special copyright shakedown fee he must shell out at the copier—EU orders! (Corporeal property rights are barely protected under EU reign.)

A process of centralization has seen the people of Europe come under the control of the institutions of the European Union. The European Commission now proposes more than half of any given country’s laws, explained a Euroskeptic on RT’s Crosstalk. Eighty seven percent of Germany’s laws are handed down by the EU and 50 percent of the UK’s laws.

Liberty, of course, is associated with a dispersion of political power, never its concentration and centralization.

MORE.

UPDATE: According to Justin Raimondo, @Antiwar.com, Kiev refuses to tolerate the,

describing the conflict as a civil war rather than a Russian “invasion.” This is a point the authorities cannot tolerate: the same meme being relentlessly broadcast by the Western media – that an indigenous rebellion with substantial support is really a Russian plot to “subvert” Ukraine and reestablish the Warsaw Pact – now has the force of law in Ukraine. Anyone who contradicts it is subject to arrest.

And even

a dissident within [the Brookings Institution], former State Department official Jeremy Shapiro, … argues that the Ukrainian conflict is a civil war that cannot have a military solution, and is more than likely to provoke a dangerous military confrontation with Russia …

… The US has no business interfering in Ukraine’s civil war, and no legitimate security interest in the question of who gets to administer Crimea – which has been Russian since the days of Catherine the Great. The idea that we are going to confront Russia over this issue is dangerous nonsense – and, unfortunately, it is just the sort of nonsense politicians of both parties find hard to resist.

There are even some ostensible “libertarians” who can’t resist the temptation to refight the cold war, notably the voluble and well-placed NATO-tarian faction of “Students for Liberty” (SFL), who denounced Ron Paul for his supposedly “pro-Putin” (i.e. anti-interventionist) statements on Ukraine. Ron is appearing at their upcoming “International Conference,” with several of the loudest NATO-tarians in attendance: one hopes he’ll give them a good talking to, although perhaps a spanking is more appropriate for these noisy brats. These juvenile blatherskites claim “Compelling arguments can be made for both advocates of globalist and noninterventionist foreign policy positions,” but aver that “Ron Paul has crossed the line.” It is they who have crossed the line: no libertarian is or can be an advocate of a “globalist” foreign policy – because conquering the globe is, you know, a statist thing.

MORE.

Josh Gelernter On South Africa

Ilana Mercer, South-Africa

SOUTH AFRICA. Many thanks to uncle David Cumes who sent me notice of Josh Gelernter’s mention, in National Review. Writes Mr. Gelernter:

Before the end of apartheid, South African writer Ilana Mercer moved, with her family, to Israel; her father was a vocal opponent of apartheid, and was being harassed by South African security forces. A 2013 piece on World Net Daily quotes Mercer as saying, with all her anti-apartheid chops, that “more people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.”

Let’s hope Mr. Gelernter takes note of the exhaustive work done in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2012), not least of The Cannibal’s analytical framework.

Valor, Honor, Courage, Thy Name Is … Robert E. Lee

America, History, States' Rights

“The attacks on his name and fame in recent years coincide exactly with the progressive deterioration of all the higher values of American tradition,” laments Clyde Wilson about one of the great heroes of this nation, and certainly of mine: Robert E. Lee. (I admire Stonewall Jackson, but, if I’m not mistaken, he executed deserters. Can’t abide that.)

Your host outside “the plantation office building where Stonewall Jackson died in Guinea Station, Virginia.”

On January 19, “the birthday of one of the greatest of all Americans,” Clyde wrote the following:

… Robert E. Lee was born in Tidewater Virginia in 1807. Two uncles signed the Declaration of Independence and his father was a notable cavalry officer in the War for Independence. He was later to wed the granddaughter of Martha Washington.

He was graduated second in his class at West Point, an institution of which he was later a distinguished superintendent. As an army officer he worked on many useful engineering projects and was distinguished under fire in the Mexican War and later on the Texas frontier. Unlike the greatest figure on the other side of the great sectional conflict of 1861—1865, who was an inveterate office-seeker but never performed any service for his fellow citizens.

In 1861 he was offered command of all the armies of the United States, the height of a soldier’s ambition. But the path of honour commanded him to choose to defend his own people from invasion rather than do the bidding of the politicians who controlled the federal machinery in Washington.

His command of the Army of Northern Virginia is one of the greatest military epics of human history. By genius, daring, and the valour of his men he again and again defeated immensely larger and better supplied armies. He was aided by a lieutenant whose birthday is only two days later: “Stonewall,” born of January 21 in 1824. In the last days of the war his army inflicted casualties on the enemy that were greater than its own numbers, but he succumbed finally to an enemy commander willing to make any sacrifice of his men to exhaust the dwindling numbers of Confederates.

His actions after the war illustrate his nobility. …

MORE from Professor Wilson (whose review of my book is excerpted here).