RedStateEclectic

A Perspective on Europe

Niall Ferguson on the European Union - see also my Another Medal for the EUSSR:

I’m absolutely certain that Lord Mandelson and Daniel Cohn-Bendit will tell you that the European experiment has succeeded because there has been peace in Europe since it began in the 1950s. Can we just knock that on the head? European integration has had absolutely nothing to do with peace in Europe since World War II; that has been the achievement of NATO [the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation]. The creation of the European Union was not about war and peace, otherwise there would have been a European Defence Community, and that was vetoed by the French National Assembly in 1954.

[...]

Europe has to be judged in economic terms, since its own terms have always been economic. And how did it do? In the 1950s the economy of integrated Europe grew at 4 per cent. In the 1960s, it was about the same. In the 1970s, growth was 2.8 per cent; in the 1980s, it slid to 2.1 per cent; in the 1990s, it was only 1.7 per cent: and so on, down to zero.

As European integration has proceeded, its growth has declined. The share of Europe in global GDP has fallen since 1980 from 31 per cent to just 19 per cent. Since 1980 the EU has grown faster than the United States in only nine out of 32 years. Never has its unemployment rate been lower than the US unemployment rate.

Are any of you investors? What were the worst equity markets of the last 10 years? They were Greece, Ireland, Italy, Finland, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Belgium — the worst in the world. And on top of all of this, we have monetary union — the ultimate experiment gone wrong.

We warned them, ladies and gentlemen. We said, if you have a monetary union without labour market integration and without any fiscal federalism, it will blow up. I predicted that in 2000. It is happening in real time, in a chemistry lab, on the other side of the Atlantic.

But this was also a political experiment gone wrong. Do you know what that experiment was? The experiment was to see if Europeans could be forced into an even closer union — despite their wishes — by economic means because the political means failed.

[...]

And when the European peoples voted against further integration, their respective governments were told to try again. It happened to the Danes in 1992, and to the Irish twice: in 2001 and again in 2008. Their citizens gave the wrong answer in the referendum, so the governments just held another one. This tells you something about why this experiment has failed — it has failed because it has lost political legitimacy. And we see this not only in Greece but in government after government across Europe. Thirteen have fallen since this crisis began two years ago, and more will follow in the months to come.

Read the full article here.

Despicable Optimists

For German intellectuals, optimism is a sort of American mental illness.

Read more in this post at NoTricksZone, the blog of an admirable American living in Germany.

Palatine Boors

[W]hy should the Palatine Boors [ie Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

The source.

 I'm asking you, Benjamin, don't let's be beastly to the Germans.

See also A Plea to James.

PS

The above image represents the distribution of German Americans according to the 2000 census.

Boston Bombing: The FBI Knew, But Did Not Stop It

Most people either don't know, don't care or won't admit that the FBI knew about the bombers in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing before they actually bombed the building.  They had an informant on the inside who wanted to replace the explosives with a harmless substitute.  Instead, the FBI reassigned him, and the bombing was successful.

Do I think that the FBI wanted people to die in the Tower that day? No.  But do I think that someone should have been held accountable, and that the FBI is perfectly capable of being every bit a sluggish, inefficient bureaucracy as all the other government agencies are.

From today, this is an interview with the mother of the Boston bombers.  Listen and tell me if you hear what I heard.

 

What I heard was that the FBI were monitoring the older brother because he was visiting Muslim extremist sites on the internet. His Mom knew about the monitoring because the FBI had come to her repeatedly and told her that he was in deep. They thought he was a leader and they were afraid of what he might do.

I don't know what to think about that.  My first reaction was that they should have stopped him, but I'm not sure what laws he broke.   I'm pretty sure that while I'm probably in the minority as usual, I don't want to give the FBI the power to arrest people based only on what sites they visit. 

My second reaction was to wonder if they had warrants to follow this guy around the internet.

And my third reaction was sadness, because based on the lack of protest I see over the de facto martial law in Boston today, it's pretty clear that most of us actually don't cherish freedom over security. 

 

Boston Bomber Djohar Tsarnaev Identifies As Islamic

I hate this. 

This is a screencap of the Russian equivalent of Facebook:

 

OK, everybody! Repeat after me:  They hate us because we're free.  

RIP Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher:

On productiveness and the charitable instinct:“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.” On the hostile press: “If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn’t swim.”

Read more at the source.

On Europe:

Thatcher’s basic take on a tight European federation was that it was unnecessary, unworkable, and dangerous. The nation state, she insisted, should remain at the heart of the international system, and a federated Europe would threaten its sway.

Moreover, Thatcher had misgivings about the Continent as a source of moral inspiration. “During my lifetime,” she reminisced, “most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one form or another, from mainland Europe, and the solutions — from outside it.”

That insight alone is priceless, but it still pales compared with what she wrote more than a decade ago, when the euro was still a toddler, and the economies of Greece, Spain and Cyprus seemed as distant from calamity as they now are from salvation. “The European single currency,” wrote Thatcher in 2002, “is bound to fail — economically, politically, and indeed socially.”

Thatcher’s reasoning for this was not ideological. It was monetarist. There can be no such thing as a united currency without a united budget, she argued, at a time when it was impolite to suggest that the euro’s newlyweds would soon accuse each other of theft, deceit, laziness, imperialism and oppression.

The source.

 

Liberty's Dawn

Writes Emma Griffin, the author of Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution:

Writers and academics often show an interesting ambivalence about industrialization. Today, they regard it as a blessing, the single-most-effective way to lift people out of poverty. But in thinking about Britain’s Industrial Revolution, they have tended to reach the opposite conclusion: The rise of the factory, they argue, caused the end of more “natural” working hours, introduced more exploitative employment patterns and dehumanized the experience of labor. It robbed workers of their autonomy and dignity.

Yet if we turn to the writing of laborers themselves, we find that they didn’t share the historians’ gloomy assessment. Starting in the early 19th century, working people in Britain began to write autobiographies and memoirs in ever greater numbers. Men (and occasionally women) who worked in factories and mines, as shoemakers and carpenters, and on the land, penned their stories, and inevitably touched on the large part of their life devoted to labor. In the process, they produced a remarkable account of the Industrial Revolution from the perspective of those who felt its effects firsthand -- one that looks very different from the standard historical narrative.

Make sure to read the rest.

See also this excellent lecture by Ralph Raico:

 

How Not To Conduct Foreign Policy 101

It's a quick class.   Lesson 1 - don't use Twitter to mock the people you're supposed to be negotiating with. 

Who would do that, you might ask?  Urm,according to National Review, that would be the USA. 

After authorities interrogated Bassem Youssef, an Egyptian comedian, for “disrupting public order,” Jon Stewart kicked off his show Monday night by defending the fellow political satirist, and going after President Mohamed Morsi. Youssef, known as Egypt’s Jon Stewart, turned himself in to authorities after a warrant was put out because of jokes he made poking fun at Morsi and Islam.

While Stewart’s fans probably got some laughs out of his segment, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo also enjoyed it so much that they shared it on their official Twitter account.

This in turn generated a stern tweet  from Egypt, and the State Department yanked the Cairo embassy's Twitter feed.  Of course, they restored it the next day, albeit with the offensive tweets removed, because Twitter is absolutely necessary to conduct serious international diplomacy. Or something.

Honestly, I never really considered myself ambassador material, but if all one needs is a vicious snark, an inate ability to inadvertantly offend people and a Twitter account, I guess I'm a natural.  Who knew?

I know - you're a little aghast knowing that even our government elite are dumb enough to tweet their every reaction to American media.  But after thinking about it for about 5 seconds, how much worse can international relations be than it was for the past 3 or 4 pre-Twitter administrations?

That's our class today! Submit your essays below for extra credit.  

 

 

The Economics of Lushness

In a strand of his argument, Matt Ridley seems to imply that man-made global warming is of a significant magnitude. Which puzzles me, as the evidence available to me seems to suggest that anthropogenic contributions are minute compared to non-human drivers of CO2 emissions. Be that as it may, I like the gist of the presentation:

 

The source is the excellent PERC - Property and Environment Research Center.

Cyprus

Following up on Angela's Meanwhile, Over In Cyprus, listen to what Nigel Farange has to say: