We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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It sounds as if brows all over Europe are being furrowed, heads are being shaken and hands being heavily wrung. What to do? What to do?
Via Instapundit:
Europe’s apparently doomed attempt to overtake the US as the world’s leading economy by 2010 will today be laid bare in a strongly worded critique by the European Commission.
The Commission’s spring report, the focal point of the March European Union economic summit, sets out in stark terms the reasons for the widening economic gap between Europe and the US.
It cites Europe’s low investment, low productivity, weak public finances and low employment rates as among the many reasons for its sluggish performance.
Mama Mia, Ai Caramba, Gott in Himmel and Merde! Does this mean that the European ‘social model’ is not working?
The Professor himself points the way:
Hmm. Bloated public sectors, high taxes, excessive regulation, and inflexible hiring rules probably have something to do with it.
Well, yes. They do have something to do with it. In fact, they have everything to do with it. But just because this is slap-in-the-face obvious, it would be unwise to assume any public (or even private) recognition of this obviousness in the halls of European power. → Continue reading: We’re in a hole! Keep digging
Clearly nothing escapes the hawk-eyed attention of these rapier-witted and attentive public servants:
A tax office official in Finland who died at his desk went unnoticed by up to 30 colleagues for two days.
The man in his 60s died last Tuesday while checking tax returns, but no-one realised he was dead until Thursday.
Getting a fiddled expenses claim past them must be a doddle. Let’s all move to Finland!
He said everyone at the tax office was feeling dreadful – and procedures would have to be reviewed.
From now on, mandatory pulse-checks every 24 hours.
The European Commission has released the latest press release on demographic developments in the European Union during 2003. This shows that the long-awaited time when deaths outweigh births and immigration maintains the population of the European Union is beginning to arrive.
The population of 380.8 million increased by 1,276,000 during 2003, of which three-quarters was due to natural migration. However, there are two worrying trends that suggest Europe’s demographic problems can only worsen in the coming years.
Germany, Italy and Greece would all have faced population declines without immigration. More countries will join this select group in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Secondly, half of the accession countries that are scheduled to join the European Union on the 1st May 2004 are already facing the problem of population decline, a problem that will be exacerbated by migration towards Western Europe.
There always has to be a disclaimer using the figures from Eurostat since demographics are one of the most unreliable of all collected statistics. Neverthless, taking this disclaimer into account, the population decline is beginning to take hold at a rapid pace.
It is the accession countries who probably have most to fear. Enlargement can be viewed as a cannibalisation of the labour markets of the accession countries by existing Member States and the newcomers face huge problems of tightening and declining labour markets in the long run. If they join the Eurozone, they will lose the remainder of the economic flexibility needed to combat this problem, since their adoption of EU laws, known as the acquis communautaire, will lead to far greater regulation from May 1st.
The European solution to the problems that they have created will be further subventions to cushion the blow of joining the European Union and satisfaction at removing a possible ring of economic competitors along their eastern border. Hopefully, Russia and the Ukraine will begin to attract more investment in the next few years and prove too large to swallow.
I suppose it had to happen. Italian legislators, no doubt hoping to look useful in the wake of the near-collapse of Italian food group Parmalat, say they need new laws to prevent the kind of abuses that have dragged the firm into the mire.
Yep, that’s the spirit. What we need is a “overhaul”, a “sweeping new set of powers”, a new super-agency with “wide-ranging” powers to prevent such things happening again.
They never learn, do they? If the public authorities had been doing their job in the first place, ie, enforce the laws preventing fraud and theft, then Parmalat would be chiefly known for its milk cartons, and not as a firm which is doomed to be known as Europe’s Enron. But I guess where there’s muck, there’s brass, as we Brits say. The firm may be teetering on the brink, but at least politicians can see the bright side and pass some impressive new laws and bolster their wonderful reputations.
I am a bit surprised there has not been more attention paid in the blogworld to the recent demise of Italian food group Parmalat, one of the country’s largest businesses employing more than 35,000 people. The firm, due to problems centering around its debt and some allegedly dodgy investment decisions, is on the brink of falling down a deep black hole.
Now, there are certain specific features of the story that pertain only to Italy and Italians. But more broadly, this saga also reminds us of how, in the higher reaches of the corporate world, accounting standards are falling short. In fact, there appear to be no standards at all.
I am sure readers will recall how the American model of capitalism was mocked for its supposedly laissez-faire nature at the time of the Enron, WoldCom and other collapses. A certain smug tone was detected in the pages of European newspapers. Well, now we have a prime example of Enronitis in Europe. Of course, European business shenanigans have been legion – witness the Byzantine affairs of French banking group Credit Lyonnais, for example. And the accounting practises of the European Commission are also a wonder to behold.
Maybe Parmalat will, however, instill a little humility among editors of European business news channels. There’s always hope.
I made a very brief trip to Belgium at the end of a trip to Amsterdam last year. On that occasion I spent a day in Brussels and a day in Bruges. My great discovery on that trip was the extraordinary quality of Belgian beer. I spent a tremendous evening in ‘t Brugs Beertje in Bruges, sometimes referred to as “the best bar in Belgium”, which on that occasion was filled with English beer buffs. (The best kind, quite possibly). On that trip, I passed Antwerp in a train, and from my guide book and what people told me, I got the impression I had missed somewhere good.
And, as it happens, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link from London to Ashford opened recently, giving me the chance to travel through Kent at over 200 km/h. I was able to both try this out and see Antwerp last weekend. I had an evening in Bruges and then a day and a half in Antwerp. The drinking in Bruges section of the trip I have documented already.
But the next day I did get to Antwerp.
 → Continue reading: Thoughts on a trip to Antwerp, and legacies of the villainy of King Leopold II
Back to Brussels for the first time since 1990 (and the first time since 1988 for more than 24 hours).
The racism is worse than I expected, especially on the part of Flemish speakers against French speakers (not just Walloons). The little things like shop opening hours, the lack of intelligence of policemen, the incompetence or unhelpfulness of bus drivers, trigger my French prejudices about Belgium being a sort of Franco-Dutch nation of retards. Partly it’s the accent and the slow-paced speech. A Belgian professor of mathematics with an IQ of 180 describing integrated calculus would sound like a dimwit to a French person.
It is all the more strange for the attractiveness of the central districts of the town. Belgium is an ancient centre of capitalism: at one time Antwerp was the world’s largest trading centre and either Ghent or Brussels (I forget which) is supposed to have the oldest stock exchange in the world. There is architectural evidence of this: the older houses of Brussels are very individually designed, there was clearly a lot of wealth around in the 17th century, and there are more statues per square mile than any other city I can think of (and most of them look pretty good).
White beggars in Belgium speak at least three languages: French, Flemish and English, they often also speak at least a smattering of a couple of either Dutch, German, Turkish or Arabic. The non-white beggars didn’t speak to me (is this an indication that whites don’t give them money willingly?). As usual in Europe, the East Europeans doing the low-status jobs are ridiculously overqualified: engineering school graduates working as garbage collectors or cleaners, bar staff with medical qualifications.
In one respect Brussels is far superior to Paris: there are street kiosks in the town centre where one can buy snails, as well as the gauffre (waffle) and crèpe sellers that have been exported to other cities. One nastier thing is that in France I can go to a hotel, pay cash, give a false name and show no ID, whereas Belgium seems to have the old surveillance society trick of requiring all visitors to register their ID (this used to include staying at private addresses, but I don’t know if that still formally applies). Another bad thing is the police sirens are the same as in London: the stupid loud whooping noises designed for a grid road city that are confusing in cramped city streets. Parisian sirens are less noisy, don’t pump the adrenalin of police drivers as much (I would love to know if there are fewer fatal road accidents caused by Paris police responding to emergency calls than London), and you can tell where they’re coming from.
I made a walk-in visit to an Emergency Room to arrange for a prescription and found a compromise between the British National Health Service (queue, grubby surroundings) and France (helpful, competent and much, much, much faster, but one pays). The price of the medication was cheaper than in the UK. I shall make enquiries about gun laws and taxes. The disturbing evidence so far is the number of notices about taxes. It is easier to find information about registering for taxes than finding a decent street map of Brussels.
In the midst of a vast, arid desert of small-minded envy and zero-sum culture, there emerges a little oasis of cool, clear refreshing sanity:
The Swiss economy has faced hard times in the past few years. One canton, Schaffhausen, is doing something about it by changing its tax law to attract wealthy people. Beginning in January 2004, Schaffhausen will replace its system of increasing marginal tax rates on income with a system of degressive marginal rates. The cantonal tax rate will be set at just under 8 percent for income of SFr 100,000. It will rise to a peak of 11.5 percent for income between SFr 600,000 and SFr 800,000. Thereafter, the marginal rate declines with each incremental chunk of income: 10 percent at SFr 1,300,000; 8 percent at SFr 3,000,000; and just over 6 percent for income more than SFr 10,000,000. This is a true incentive-based tax system—the larger one’s income, the lower one’s marginal rate.
Seems that the penny (or the Franc) has dropped in one small corner of one small country. They have realised that penalising success is a pretty good way of guaranteeing failure.
Schaffhausen has its own legislative parliament, which contains eighty deputies representing all regions within the canton. Eight political parties compete for these seats. Evidently Schaffhausen’s voters support a tax cut that gives the greatest benefits to the richest people. They believe that attracting wealthy individuals to reside in their midst is good for everyone.
And they are right.
[My thanks to Stephen Pollard for the link.]
Brave, crusading, iconoclastic Guardian correspondent Matthew Tempest is striking out against the evil, right-wing, corporate-media conspiracy that is actively suppressing the truth:
It’s an unthinking, immutable truth for the mainstream media that young people are not interested in politics.
So, if they were permitted to read about it, many of that media’s consumers/readers would be surprised to learn that today something like 60,000 mostly twentysomething people from all over Europe will gather in Paris, unpaid, in their own time…
No-one is permitted to read about this. It is unclean. It is seditious. It is dangerous propoganda and, I swear, if you even cast your eyes over so much as a single sentence of it, your door will be knocked down and you will be dragged away by the jackbooted goons of the Bushista-Berlusconi-Murdoch Mind-Control Reich and subjected to continuous loops of Fox News until your eyeballs explode.
…to sit through four days, 10 hours a day, of..
Nose-picking, navel-gazing and self-abuse.
…lectures, seminars and talks on politics.
Same thing.
And it’s not just any old politics. The topics are largely esoteric, complex and abstract…
Translation:a load of incontinent, incomprehensible drivel.
Until today, the ESF had almost no coverage in the mainstream British media.
Well, what do you expect? Nobody dare speak of such things, lest they be ‘eliminated’ by the all-seeing, all-knowing, omnipotent Zionist-Corporate-Illuminati World Control Machine.
The event is the European Social Forum…
No kidding?!! → Continue reading: Mass debating in Paris
The ‘fraudster’ meaning, of course, Jacques Chirac. The new president of the European Central Bank is M. Jean-Claude Trichet and buried away at the foot of an old news report is this gem:
Mr Trichet’s nomination was made possible earlier this week when he was cleared of involvement in the Credit Lyonnais banking scandal in the 1990s. He was one of nine men on trial for their part in the affair, which culminated in a €31bn ($33.7bn) bailout by the government.
That is more than £21,000,000,000! For one bank. Nine people. I can just hear them: “Bah! Nick Leeson! “Betsygate” indeed! You English drive your minis with your Benny Hill and your Michael Caine, stealing a few gold bars in Milan and think you’re so marvellous! Hah!”
The Crédit Lyonnais bank ‘affair’ included a massive fraud including loans being made to friends of the late president François Mitterand. At least one of them got a few months in jail to my knowledge. A concerted effort was made to delay the appointment of a new ECB president until M. Trichet’s problems could be dealt with. Ironically, the French verb for to cheat is tricher which is pronounced exactly the same as our new Euro bank president’s name. A very suitable friend for M. Jacques Chirac. The president whose unofficial re-election campaign slogan was Vote for the fraudster, not the fascist! but who has avoided judicial processes by virtue of presidential immunity from prosecution. So much in common for them to talk about.
Now let us assume that M. Trichet were the innocent victim of devious bank subordinates who stole £21,000 million. Personally, I find such a degree of stupidity fantastic: the guy could scarcely have enough brain cells to know how to breathe. Is this really the calibre of executive to put in charge of an EU institution?
A couple of other things worry me. What did the other European leaders think they were doing when none of then vetoed the appointment of Trichet? Perhaps Mr Blair really is a closet hater of the euro – I hope so. And if the currency markets are not dumping euros for US dollars before M. Chirac’s friends get their pillaging underway… what do they know about what the Federal Reserve guys are up to?
Italy has just had a major blackout.
Let’s see now… USA, UK, Italy… I wonder if Spain has had one yet? Each blackout has a prosaic explanation, but taken all at once this rash of failures flags these blackouts unusual in a statistical sense if nought else.
At the risk of inviting opprobrium, I must admit that the murder of Anna Lindh did have me reaching for the tin-foil to wrap around my head.
Even with the solid support of the entire Swedish political class, the ‘yes’ camp was still trailing the ‘no’ camp in every single opinion poll and it did briefly cross my mind that a ‘heroic sacrifice’ might have been arranged to swing the vote. The stakes here are certainly high enough.
But, on balance, probably not. Political assassination is common enough in Europe not to have to ascribe a conspiracy to this one. Even if there was more to her murder than meets the eye, it didn’t work. The Swedes voted ‘no’ to the Euro.
On any reading this is a blow for the EU project and the coming weeks will see a deluge of federast seething, threatening and whining. Their will has been thwarted and that it just intolerable. They will even try to float the notion that the result of the Swedish referendum was ‘undemocratic’. I also expect the Swedish government to begin agitating for another referendum to get the desired result but, given the margin of the ‘no’ victory, they may not get away with that.
Quite aside from all the furore and recriminations that are bound to follow, I wonder if this could be the catalyst which leads to the unravelling of the whole project. It isn’t very likely but neither is it altogether impossible. In fact, I quite like the idea of a ‘Euro-Watch’ sweepstake: who will be the first to bail out of the Euro?
For the record, my money (sterling!) is on the French. The Germans will stick with it because they have always had an emotional investment in the European project. It enables them to be ‘Europeans’ and thus serves to expiate their guilt about being German. They will endure a lot more economic pain before they begin to think the unthinkable.
But not the French. For them, the EU has always been about advancing their national interests. All the kumbaya mummery about a united Europe is just window-dressing to disguise the self-serving reality. If it looks like wrecking their economy (or, more particularly, it begins biting into the privileges of the political class) the French will simply dump the Euro and swan off to look for another boondoggle.
Not inevitable by any means, but possible. In anticipation, I would like to extend my thanks to the Swedish electorate. They may just have done us a great favour.
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