More Euro-Fantasy

Much of the construction and the future design of a United Europe dreamt of by the elites is too absurd to take at face value

By Anthony de Jasay

Germany has a new government. As far as one can foretell, its byword for the next four years will be "steady as she goes". Forty per cent of the electorate voted center-right, 25 per cent center-left. For most practical purposes it looks that the bulk of the electorate is quite content to have the country go on becoming like a greatly enlarged Switzerland. There is less and less left of the romantic, passionately patriotic, dutiful and a little maladroit German of history. The modern German is mostly inward-looking, more interested in his hobby than in national affairs, and pragmatic rather than highly principled. He does his duty reliably as in the past, but does so because that is the way quietly to get richer and not because he feels under moral compulsion. He does not see why Germany should have a foreign policy, and he is quite content to witness the process by which she is getting ever closer to becoming a member of a federal Europe provided this does not call for one-sided financial sacrifice. Paying dearly for it would, of course, be most un-Swiss.

However, embedded in all this prosaic sobriety and practical sense is a minority of opinion-makers, jurists, civil servants and other elements of the elite who persist in believing in a tightly-knit federal Europe as an ideal for which they will strive at any reasonable cost and that the present opportunity to create such a Europe is a chance which must not be missed. Though in a minority, they are highly influential and have very little opposition from the mostly passive majority. It is they who spread the belief that allowing Greece to default, France to be humiliated, and deficit countries to be squeezed beyond the politically tolerable would be fundamentally mistaken. At times, their arguments seem to lack any reference to reality and resemble delirious fantasies of the sectarian. A somewhat similar clinging to a delirious dream also characterizes the non-German federalists who make the running in their respective countries, though their motives are dissimilar and much less idealistic.

Another Step Closer To Economic Armageddon

Draghi introduced additional ease into Europe this morning

By Monty Pelerin

A surprise rate cut (67 of 70 economists did not see it coming, which provides a proxy IQ test for these geniuses) created turmoil in markets.

What this means by noon today is unknowable. What it means in a larger context is not:

• Europe is not in good shape. Anyone who believed they were, should be disabused of such notions.
• The forcing down of interest rates once again further exacerbates the longer-term mis-allocation of resources. Such actions may buy time, but only at the cost of greater problems down the road.
• Maco-economics is failed witchcraft which should be apparent to anyone paying attention. Yet it will continue to be used to justify “remedial” actions out of desperation.
• Governments around the world have only this hammer (liquidity/stimulus). They will hammer away even though that cannot solve the problem(s).
• Liquidity and stimulus will not end in the US or Europe until markets end it. The market ending will be either an implosion or a crack-up boom. Either is possible at this stage.
• Governments are in full pretend mode. They have no control over the situation other than to fool people into believing that things are getting better.
• The policies employed by governments ensure the destruction of economies and themselves. Governments spiral downward toward defaults and bankruptcy that will take economies with them.
• Currencies are being destroyed in terms of purchasing power.
• Nothing is being done to correct economic problems. Politics has deemed true remedies too severe. They are off the table, replaced by extend and pretend actions.
• The shelf-life of this government fraud is limited. Economic Armageddon is coming.

The frustrations of watching this play out are huge. So too is the knowledge that this entire scheme jeopardizes more than living standards and economies. It threatens the very future and quality of civilizations themselves. 

The Outrage Arrives

You can't keep your insurance because Democrats don't want you to control your own health-care spending

By By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR

The White House has issued a clarification. When the president said if you like your insurance plan you can keep it, what he meant was you can keep it if he likes it.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans who are getting policy cancellation notices this month can't be as surprised as they pretend to be. President Obama made it clear at his 2010 health care summit what he thought of their taste in insurance.

"It's the equivalent of Acme Insurance that I had for my car. . . . It's basically not health insurance," he explained. "It's house insurance. . . .

"I'm buying that to protect me from some catastrophic situation; otherwise, I'm just paying out of pocket. I don't go to the doctor. I don't get preventive care. There are a whole bunch of things I just do without. But if I get hit by a truck, maybe I don't go bankrupt."

Notice his disdain for those who buy high-deductible policies to protect themselves only from unexpected and unmanageable health-care costs. They are too cheap or too dumb to reach into their own pockets for necessary care that isn't covered by their policy or triggers the deductible.

These customers might like their plan. Their plan might even be the best cure, as many experts believe, for what ails our health-care system, namely too much incentive for Americans to overconsume health care. But Mr. Obama doesn't like their plans so they can't keep them.

Democrats at least are consistent. Back in 1993, during the fight over HillaryCare, Mrs. Clinton explained Democratic reasoning to then-House GOP Leader Denny Hastert. If Americans are allowed too much discretion over how they spend their health-care dollars, Mrs. Clinton said, "We just think people will be too focused on saving money and they won't get the care for their children and themselves that they need . . .

"The money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better."

Not only was it deliberate ObamaCare policy to make sure plans millions of Americans like would no longer be available, forcing them to buy more coverage than they want or need. NBC reports that the White House—as Mr. Obama was promising Americans they could keep their current plans—was estimating at least seven million people would not be allowed to keep their current plans.

In drafting rules to put ObamaCare into effect, the Health and Human Services department under Kathleen Sebelius tightened the grandfathering eligibility to make sure even more people would be forced to switch to the excessively costly policies that Mr. Obama wants them to buy. Mr. Obama says he cares about your incentive to get preventive care or tests that you may not get if they don't appear to involve a free lunch.

But the truth is, he wants you to pay for coverage you'll never use (mental-health services, cancer wigs, fertility treatments, Viagra) so the money can be spent on somebody else.

A nod goes to the Los Angeles Times, whose coverage of the inequities of ObamaCare has been exemplary. On Monday, it set the political world afire with a story about thousands of Californians losing coverage. "This is when the actual sticker shock comes into play for people," UCLA health-care researcher Gerald Kominski told the paper. "There are winners and losers under the Affordable Care Act."

Welcome to the United Police States of America

There comes a time when silence is betrayal

By John W. Whitehead

No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. What is unusual is our lack of outrage, the relative disinterest of our elected representatives, the media’s abysmal failure to ask questions and demand answers, and our growing acceptance of the status quo in the United Police States of America—a status quo in which “we the people” are powerless in the face of the heavy-handed tactics employed by the government and its armed agents.

However, as I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, it’s all part of the larger police state continuum. Thus, with each tragic shooting that is shrugged off or covered up, each piece of legislation passed that criminalizes otherwise legal activities, every surveillance drone that takes to the skies, every phone call, email or text that is spied on, and every transaction that is monitored, the government’s stranglehold over our lives grows stronger.

We have been silent about too many things for too long, not the least of which is the deadly tendency on the part of police to resort to lethal force. However, as Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

Fiscal Cancer Hits Home

Kiss Your Pension Goodbye

By Dennis Miller

I was on the reunion committee for my 50-year high school class reunion a few years back. As we tried to track down classmates, we discovered that many—including a few I had known quite well—had died from lung cancer. These folks would light up a cigarette, joke about cancer sticks, cough, and make fun of their addiction. They ignored their symptoms and the constant warnings from their families and doctors, and they suffered the ugly consequences.

Former US Comptroller General David Walker appeared on 60 Minutes back in July 2007. His message? Our country is suffering from a fiscal cancer far more dangerous than any external threat. The federal government is broke. It has promised entitlement benefits—health care in particular—that it cannot afford. While few economists disagreed with Walker's projections, politicians were unwilling to actually address the problem. From their standpoint, it's always better to push the problem off to a later date in the vain hope (or delusion) that it will simply disappear.

Walker eventually gave up trying to educate politicians and took his message straight to the people. The Wall Street Journal referred to him as "Chicken Little," and no one in Washington wanted to hear his doom-and-gloom message. After all, the economy was fine (remember, this was 2007). They either could not or would not see the problem. Walker was ignored.

Since then, the fiscal cancer Walker warned of has continued to grow. In July 2007, our national debt was $8.9 trillion. Six years later, it has nearly doubled to $16.7 trillion. The cancer has metastasized.

A Different Fiscal Cancer Hits Closer to Home

While the fiscal cancer Walker warned of continues to grow, pensioners are about to battle another type of cancer—one that is eating away at the money they thought would sustain them through retirement.

The Road to Decline

America’s Self-Inflicted Wounds

By Ting Xu

It is alarming to read the campaign advice that Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great Roman orator, received. Cicero was encouraged to inflame his opponents with scandals, pay special attention to the wealthy and powerful, keep up the hope of the zealous and devoted, put on good shows and “promise them anything” they want and forget about it. His successful campaign mirrors today’s political theater in America. But Cicero’s devotion to political maneuvering did not protect him (he was murdered by Mark Antony during his pursuit to become dictator of the country), nor the Roman republic. The sad story of the blunt calculating brilliance of Cicero and the fall of the great Republic should serve warn America: freedom and democracy are not free.

America’s greatness was very much a function of the visionary pragmatism of its founding fathers. The common sense decision to pursue liberty, equality and individual well-being was achieved through creativity, openness and consensus based on compromise.  American leadership internationally is based on not only its economic prosperity, but also the sense of hope it brings to those who seek peace and development. The country has achieved great things and the American dream stays alive in a society that offers all the possibilities that are created because America is a leader in the pursuit  of open markets, technological innovation, and equal opportunity.

Self-Esteem vs. Self-Respect

Different as depth and shallowness

by Theodore Dalrymple
With the coyness of someone revealing a bizarre sexual taste, my patients would often say to me, "Doctor, I think I'm suffering from low self-esteem." This, they believed, was at the root of their problem, whatever it was, for there is hardly any undesirable behavior or experience that has not been attributed, in the press and on the air, in books and in private conversations, to low self-esteem, from eating too much to mass murder.

Self-esteem is, of course, a term in the modern lexicon of psychobabble, and psychobabble is itself the verbal expression of self-absorption without self-examination. The former is a pleasurable vice, the latter a painful discipline. An accomplished psychobabbler can talk for hours about himself without revealing anything.

Marx and Left Revolutionary Hegelianism

The End of History that Wasn't

[This article is excerpted from volume 2, chapter 11 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)

by Murray N. Rothbard

Hegel's death in 1831 inevitably ushered in a new and very different era in the history of Hegelianism. Hegel was supposed to bring about the end of history, but now Hegel was dead, and history continued to march on. So if Hegel himself was not the final culmination of history, then perhaps the Prussian state of Friedrich Wilhelm III was not the final stage of history either. But if it was not the final phase of history, then mightn't the dialectic of history be getting ready for yet another twist, another Aufhebung?

So reasoned groups of radical youth, who, during the last 1830s and 1840s in Germany and elsewhere, formed the movement of Young, or Left, Hegelians. Disillusioned in the Prussian state, the Young Hegelians proclaimed the inevitable coming apocalyptic revolution to destroy and transcend that state, a revolution that would really bring about the end of history in the form of national, or world, communism.

The Pyrrhic victory of central planning

Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning

By Tim Price

“Can an economy that has become dependent on lies, misrepresentation, ‘fudging’ of numbers, fraud, embezzlement and a multitude of skimming and scamming operations escape the moral and financial black hole it has created ? The self-evident answer is ‘no’.”

— Charles Hugh Smith, 28 August 2012, as quoted in Edelweiss Journal.

When the parent company of Universal Pictures bought the rights to Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park, by all accounts they insisted that the slated director, Steven Spielberg, make that film before the film he had earlier wanted to make, namely Schindler’s List. Anybody who has seen Schindler’s List, or for that matter anyone who is even loosely familiar with the Holocaust, will understand why.

We mention Schindler’s List because a broadly related piece by Simon London in the Financial Times from June 2005 asked:

What is your favourite business book?

Simon London went on to answer his own question, citing, for example, The Living Company by Arie de Geus (business strategy seen through the prism of Anglo-Dutch corporate giant Royal Dutch Shell), and Good to Great by Jim Collins (a snapshot of then successful US businesses that may or may not have possessed unique corporate DNA). But he went on to highlight a book that, despite being widely translated and an international bestseller, is (in the opinion of this writer) insufficiently well known to readers today.

Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning is described as “the classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust”. As Simon London then observed, this description is “both true and insufficient”. As Simon London then wrote, we concur: if you have not read it yet, it cannot be recommended too highly. 

Viktor Frankl was a graduate in medicine from the University of Vienna. He ended up imprisoned in Auschwitz, Dachau and other concentration camps. He survived against extraordinary odds and in the face of unimaginable physical and mental hardships, and went on to return after the war to the University of Vienna where he served as professor of neurology and psychiatry.

During his time in the concentration camps, Frankl observed, as Simon London writes, in the most extreme conditions, human beings at the very limit of what is imaginable and what can be suffered:

Jonathan Swift: man of mystery

Untangling the facts and fictions of Jonathan Swift's life

by Pat Rogers

When Harold Bloom got busy defining the Western canon for us some twenty years ago, his short list of the main men and women in literature included only one figure from the high eighteenth century. That was Samuel Johnson, whom Bloom later admitted he read all the time “because he is my great hero as a literary critic and I have tried to model myself upon him all my life.” No Voltaire, Diderot, or Rousseau. No Defoe, Fielding, or Sterne. And no Swift. But the ship has sailed, and now even Johnson can do little more than cling on to canonical status in the place where it really matters most—the corpus of student texts. Like Pope, he didn’t write anything deemed worthy of admission to the Norton Critical Editions—a publishing decision no doubt based on canny sales forecasts. Only Swift holds secure, thanks mainly to Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal. These remain living classics, influential on writers and readers alike. Gullivermorphs easily into popular culture and science fiction. And Swift sometimes manages to rate among the British authors on whom graduates are writing the most dissertations, not too far behind Shakespeare and Angela Carter. He’s almost become Swift Our Contemporary.

As a result, scholars and devoted readers, as well as marketing people, can see there is room for a good new biography. Luckily, the gap has been filled by Leo Damrosch in a book that is more than good—it is masterly in its control of the material, its neat formal organization, and its deft unbuttoned style.1 To understand just what Damrosch has achieved, we need to explore the biographic context a little. He isn’t a professed Swiftian like some of his predecessors, although he has written excellent books on subjects such as Blake, Hume, Johnson, Pope, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. Understandably, he shows some impatience here with the hitters designated by Swift’s academic team, accusing them of closing their minds to the work of independent scholars and “amateur” researchers. But there is a more prominent, if cumbrous, elephant in the room, and in almost every chapter of the new life the author has to confront the issues that arise.

On Politics, War and Compromise

Tea Party Game Show With Guest Host Cass Sunstein

by Richard Reinsch     

Cass Sunstein recently published two short essays-here and here-on the current political struggles between “tea-party” conservatives and progressives. In the first essay, Sunstein attempts to link our current political fracturing with the famous standoff between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.  His second essay, which compares Whittaker Chambers and Ayn Rand’s divergent philosophies and then links their disagreements to various tendencies within present-day conservatism, is much better. My own thoughts on this precise question of Chambers, Rand, and conservatism are here.

The first essay argues that the titanic struggle between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss that culminated with Hiss’s federal conviction for perjury in 1950 (re: lying about espionage engaged in on behalf of the Soviet Union) is the foundational split between conservatives and liberals in America. Moreover, Sunstein argues that the ‘paranoid style’ both camps evince toward one another, but mostly conservative intransigence to progressives, is best understood through the Chambers-Hiss episode. This seems a bridge too far in my judgment. Moreover, it’s a card that’s been played: queue Sam Tanenhaus.

Sunstein’s real point, though, is to root conservative advocacy in a unique historical episode that conservatives can’t let go of. The Hiss-Chambers affair was an exceptional moment in American political history. Conservatives, cough Ted Cruz, cough Rand Paul, can’t let go of its spirit of paranoia, outrage, and anger at progressives. They have, if only unconsciously, breathed in its sharper edges, and seek to wield this against their contemporary traitorous foes. Thus, their contemporary advocacy is really a dance of whirling dervishes unable to speak coherently to reality.

Janet Yellen's Fed Has The Makings Of A Potential Disaster

The whole basis of her theory is that people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions, that the market shouldn’t be free

By Kieth Wiener

President Obama has nominated Janet Yellen to be the next Federal Reserve Chairman. We need to know what she stands for if we want to predict what the central bank will do to us next. Clearly, Yellen will continue Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing, but her papers and speeches show that she is quite different from her predecessor.

Let’s start by looking at Bernanke as a reference. Bernanke pays homage to the economist Milton Friedman, who is widely known for wanting basically free markets with a passive Fed. Less well known is Friedman’s advocacy of money pumping in a crisis. This explains the Bernanke we keep seeing on TV. A crisis erupted a few years after he took office (his arrival and the eventual crisis not unrelated), and so he has been madly pumping ever since. If the crisis somehow abated, he would stop. Bernanke is part central planner and part free marketer.

By contrast, Yellen is all central planner. She gets her ideas, not from Friedman, but from John Maynard Keynes. Keynes did not trust markets, preferring government intervention. His prescribed solution to recession and unemployment is for the government to increase spending and the central bank to reduce interest. Today, we call this form of governance “cronyism,’ but it once had another name. “Fascist economics” is how Italian dictator Mussolini approvingly characterized Keynes’ work.

Yellen is even more radical than Keynes, and believes intervention isn’t just for downturns. We see this belief in the theory of labor she presents in a key 1990 paper, and then the practical policy she proposes in a recent speech.

In the paper, Yellen and her coauthor discuss the cause of unemployment and how to eliminate it. Here is their tenuous chain of logic: 1. Disgruntled employees don’t work hard, and may even sabotage machinery. 2. So companies must overpay to keep them from slacking. 3. Higher pay per worker means fewer workers, because companies have a finite budget. Yellen concludes—you guessed it: 4. inflation provides corporations with more money to hire more people.

The Fight for Freedom of Speech Start Here

Freedom of speech makes us free; it makes us moral; it makes us human. It is enjoyed by all, or it is enjoyed by none.

By BRENDAN O’NEILL

Were you outraged when a couple of London coppers suggested to a newspaper vendor that he should stop selling Private Eye magazine on the basis that its cover image might prejudice the trial of former News International boss Rebekah Brooks? Good. You should have been. No one with any sense - not to mention a love for liberty - should want to live in a country where policemen get to say what sort of material people can print, hawk and read. That way tyranny lies.

But wait - were you equally outraged when, last year, police in Manchester confiscated hundreds of copies of Red Issue, the Man Utd fanzine, on the basis that a cartoon it contained could have angered Liverpool FC fans? If you were, then, again, good. To have a situation where the boys in blue can forcibly impound printed material that they’ve unilaterally decreed to be ‘offensive’ - as happened in Manchester - runs counter to every principle of liberty. It turns the clock back to that black period when the authorities got to say what the rest of us could say, depict and declare, when the right to speak was a gift of officialdom handed only to those whose ideas pleased the powers-that-be.

If you weren’t as outraged by the massive police op against Red Issue as you were by the comparatively small-scale harassment of that Private Eye vendor, if you didn’t tweet and rail against that Stasi-like squishing of an ‘offensive’ football mag in the same way you did over the Private Eye fiasco… well, why not? Do you think freedom of speech is less important for football fans than for people interested in political and media gossip? Do you think footie fanzines are fair game for state obliteration, and it’s only clever political material we should worry about protecting from the long arm of the law?

Television Is an Evil

If not the root of all evil, at least the root of much evil

by Theodore Dalrymple

Most people read to confirm their prejudices rather than to learn something new or change their minds. Moreover, they recall what confirms their opinions much better than they remember what contradicts them. So aware was Charles Darwin of this human tendency that, at least according to his Autobiography, he wrote down anything he read that contradicted his views, for otherwise (he said) he was sure to forget it. 

I must admit that like most of humanity, I am not as honest as Darwin and am reluctant to give up my cherished beliefs even in the face of facts that contradict them. I do on occasion change my mind about something, but slowly and usually without acknowledging that I have done so. I prefer to think that the opinion I now hold is the opinion I have held all my life, rather as Kim Il-sung emerged, according to his hagiographers, as a fully fledged Korean Marxist-Leninist revolutionary by the age of eight. To acknowledge that one has changed one’s mind about something is to admit one’s fallibility and the possibility that if one was wrong before, one might be wrong again. And in our hearts we know that we are always right.

That is why I was overjoyed recently in Paris to find a well-documented book that confirmed one of my deepest prejudices, namely that television is, if not the root of all evil, at least the root of much evil. That is why I haven’t had one for more than forty years. The book was called TV Lobotomie, which hardly needs translation.

The man who put the first germ of the prejudice against TV in my mind was Malcolm Muggeridge, a now-forgotten British journalist who, bizarrely, emigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s in search of a better life. Far from finding the paradise he had expected, however, he found a kind of hell. During the Ukrainian famine he sent back truthful reports to the Manchester Guardian (now the Guardian), which published only some of them. He was particularly outraged by the Western intellectuals who took starvation for plenty and tyranny for freedom, and he satirized them mercilessly in his book Winter in Moscow. 

Making Suspicious Minds Mandatory

Criminalising people who fail to report suspicions of child abuse will poison social relations

By FRANK FUREDI

People often respond to events that distress or shock them with the statement ‘it should be a crime’. My grandma, for instance, was convinced that extramarital affairs should be a crime. In recent decades the phrase ‘it should be a crime’ has been regularly repeated by a chorus of unofficial organisations zealously committed to intensifying the policing of human behaviour. Like many a traditionalist grandma, they enjoy converting their prejudices into policy advice. But unfortunately, unlike my grandmother, these moral crusaders actually have the power to influence public policy.

This week it was the turn of Keir Starmer, the former director of public prosecutions (DPP), to issue the call, ‘it should be a crime’. Speaking on the BBC’sPanorama programme, he argued for the criminalisation of people who did not report suspected child abuse. Panorama, which has come to embrace the reality-television format, now serves as a powerful vehicle for the cultivation of moral outrage. The influence of the show is demonstrated by the fact that its message immediately becomes a major subject of discussion in the wider media.

Unlike many demands for the criminalisation of behaviour, Starmer’s call for the mandatory reporting of suspicions of child abuse does not aim to punish people for what they have done. Its aim is to persecute certain professionals for something they have not done, those, that is, who have failed to act in accordance with the ethos of the current obsessive regime of child protection. The demand to criminalise individuals who do not report their suspicions is justified on the grounds that it will curb the activities of future Jimmy Saviles. ‘Without a change in the law, there’ll be another Savile’, argued Starmer. (These days the very mention of Jimmy Savile usually serves as a prelude to the demand that something ‘should be a crime’.)

The institutionalisation of the mandatory reporting of suspicions will do nothing to help children preyed upon by paedophiles. After all, there is no shortage of reporting such suspicions to a diverse range of institutions. Most social-work professionals acknowledge that the child-protection system is already overloaded with far more cases than it can properly handle. As matters stand, the flood of such reports already means that it is difficult for authorities to make important distinctions between the relatively trivial cases of neglect and the really serious threats facing children. Moreover, those demanding the mandatory reporting of suspicions overlook the fact that in the relevant institutional setting, people already have a duty to report their suspicions. As Professor Eileen Munro, a government adviser on child protection, noted, ‘the debate around mandatory reporting creates a misleading impression that people don’t already have a duty to convey maltreatment if they have any suspicion of it’.

Europe and the Zero Bound

As in the U.S., another rate cut isn't enough for faster growth

The European Central Bank turned heads by cutting its benchmark interest rates by 0.25 percentage points on Thursday, though calling it a dovish move would imply that the ECB has been hawkish. The main refinancing rate sat at 0.5% for six months before this week.

The best argument for a rate cut is that euro-zone inflation has been falling all year and came in below 1% in October. The central bank's sole mandate is price stability, which means preventing excessive price changes in both directions. ECB President Mario Draghi made clear Thursday that the lower inflation outlook was the most important calculation behind the rate cut. The central banker has refused to pretend that a 25-basis-point cut in banks' refinancing rate is the difference between euro-zone salvation and damnation, which can't be said of some commentators.

Mr. Draghi also dismissed fears that low inflation is about to turn into a deflationary spiral. Not long ago, moderately improved business surveys were supposed to presage a strong European revival. Now, "dangerously low" inflation is said to threaten the recovery.

As Mr. Draghi pointed out, recent low inflation is due in large part to stable food prices and falling energy prices, as well as the effect of previous VAT increases dropping out of the data. But even a proper, prolonged dose of low inflation wouldn't be the worst thing for Europe.

Inflation has been falling most in euro-zone countries where wages have been falling most, which is good for real household income and consumption in those countries. The one euro country experiencing out-and-out deflation is Greece, where relative price adjustment has been a stated goal of crisis resolution.

A weaker euro will be a boon for German exports, which the U.S. Treasury and others blame for holding back euro-zone recovery. The new government in Germany isn't about to open its spending floodgates, which is what European Keynesians are really demanding when they complain about insufficient German "demand." The better complaint is that Berlin won't cut taxes, which would lift German growth and thus its demand for other countries' exports.

Tales From the Brussels Crypt

Harassed and Bossed Around by Bureaucrats

By Pater Tenebrarum

The bureaucrats in Brussels treat the citizenry of the EU like a gang of small children that needs to be kept in check by benevolent overseers. Their most recent strikes all aim at allegedly 'saving the planet' while slowly but surely rolling back the blessings of civilization.

Naturally, most people are barely aware of what is happening. After all, who has the time to actually look through a 60 pages long document entitled “Development of EU Ecolabel Criteria for Flushing Toilets and Urinals”? Mind this is just a 'working paper', but you can already guess what the end result will be. Toilets all of a sudden won't flush properly anymore. The filthy toilet plunger, long thought to be an instrument used only in the gravest of emergencies, will have to be employed on a regular basis. Taking a shower will suddenly feel like standing in a weak drizzle. Very few people will know what happened of course, but everybody will be aware that the quality of life has declined by a notch. 

If people were to sit down in the morgue-like lighting provided by the expensive and highly poisonous 'energy savings lamps' EU citizens are forced to use these days instead of the trusty incandescent light bulb, and took the time to read through various EU directives, they would realize that their non-working toilets and weak showers are the work of bureaucrats in Brussels. As the latest 'working paper' indicates, things are about to take a turn for the worse. Under 'proposed criterion' we read that 

“The full flush volume, independent of the water pressure, of flushing toilet and flushing urinal equipment, when placed on the market, shall not exceed the value presented in Table 2.” 

So how much water are citizens going to be allowed per flush henceforth? 6 liters – that is 1.58 gallons. In times of yore, a good toilet flush was accomplished with 5 gallons, or roughly 20 liters. Plunger? No-one ever had to think about that filthy appurtenance much.

Of course not a drop of water will be saved by having only 1.58 gallons per flush available either, because it means one must flush 3 or 4 times before the business is done. All that is going to happen is that citizens will have to relinquish enjoyment of the full blessings of one of the most important advances of civilization: indoor plumbing.

America's Ruling Class

And the Perils of Revolution

The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party -- and its vision is revolutionary. 

By Angelo M. Codevilla

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several "stimulus" bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government's agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about "global warming" for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

A World Split Apart

Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University, June 8, 1978

By Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn

I am sincerely happy to be here with you on the occasion of the 327th commencement of this old and illustrious university. My congratulations and best wishes to all of today's graduates.

Harvard's motto is "VERITAS." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of much discord. Also, truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter. A measure of truth is included in my speech today, but I offer it as a friend, not as an adversary.

Three years ago in the United States I said certain things that were rejected and appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I said . . .

The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of destroying each other. However, the understanding of the split too often is limited to this political conception: the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. These deep manifold splits bear the danger of equally manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom — in this case, our Earth — divided against itself cannot stand.

There is the concept of the Third World: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture, especially if it is spread over a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this China, India, the Muslim world, and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as uniform.

For one thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its special character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in Communist captivity. And while it may be that in past years Japan has increasingly become, in effect, a Far West, drawing ever closer to Western ways (I am no judge here), Israel, I think, should not be reckoned as part of the West, if only because of the decisive circumstance that its state system is fundamentally linked to its religion.

How short a time ago, relatively, the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but usually with contempt for any possible values in the conquered people's approach to life. It all seemed an overwhelming success, with no geographic limits. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden the twentieth century brought the clear realization of this society's fragility.

Datagate and the Death of American Liberalism

The Bolshevik Left Loves the NSA

By Justin Raimondo

The widely noted poll showing Democrats are now the biggest cheerleaders for the Surveillance State has conservatives delightedly calling out the left for “hypocrisy,” noting with glee the leftie pundits who denounced George W. Bush’s administration for trampling on our civil liberties and are now defending the Regime against the Snowden - Greenwald revelations . Their liberal targets come out swinging, however, rightly pointing out that that PRISM and the phone collection program originated under George W. Bush’s watch, back when all these born-again civil libertarians of the right were either silent or supportive of these measures.

Indeed, the left has gone on the offensive, crowing that what Edward Snowden calls the “architecture of oppression” is all perfectly legal, pointing out that the NSA went through the FISA court – a secret “court” whose orders are classified top, and that, out of thousands of such requests, has only denied the government a grand total of 11 times. This left-right dynamic dramatizes the symbiotic relationship between authoritarians on both sides of the political spectrum – and, perhaps, explains how the Panopticon unveiled by Snowden came to be built and legitimized.