As Silverwolf sits and watches the Revolution take place, comfortably ensconced on his mountain top, far away from those European shores, which is the best vantage to watch revolutions, he reads of the chaos of the PIGS as European Socialism begins its long-inevitable crumble.
A mighty oak can grow and swell to several yards in diameter for hundreds of years, but one day, inevitably, it will crash to the ground, and the vultures of ants, termites, larvae, and woodcutters, will descend on the corpse, all to make use and recycle it for their own pressing needs of life. And so it is with Euro-Socialism, or rather with the whole Keynesian fabulation, which also pervades North America and Asia. Europe is just the first obvious victim of Socialism, because it has been the most vocal in supporting a basically Socialist economy, or a mixed economy with a huge Socialist element, for decades. It’s not only the Swedes and the whale-butchers of Norge who were big fans of Socialism. Remember Bismarck’s Social Security scams, and cushy giveaways to German civil servants; recall that it was Winston Churchill, of all people, who brought in many of the Socialist welfare schemes right after the Second World War that became axiomatic to English life after the dole. Not that they didn’t ameliorate a lot of suffering in the short-term in war-bankrupted England, who came out of it far worse economically than Germany did, but in the long-run they developed the welfare mentality in England, and straddled it with the chastity belt of Socialism that makes culturally-fertile impregnation so difficult. The victors got the drippings of the Americans’ noses; the Germans got massive foreign aid which turned them into the Treasury of Europe. That’ll teach those Brits to fight the war for two years on their own, in place of America, eh what?
So Silverwolf has been observing the slaughter of the PIGS of Europe, those four basket-case economies, Portugal Ireland Greece Spain, acronyming to the little porcine devils. These countries have racked up debt so phenomenal in the short time they’ve been in the Eurozone, that it’s now realized that Socialism has already eaten the cake, and now all of Europe is going to have to live on blanched acorns for the next four winters. The Greek debt alone is a mind-boggling $419 billion dollars worth for just eleven million people. Now that works out roughly to about forty grand for every man, woman and child. And the retzina-quaffing Papadapoli of Maroussi are internationally-known for their vast Capitalist economy, aren’t they? Or has someone been pulling Silverwolf’s hind paws again?
Now $419 billion plus annual interest sounds like an awful lot to Silverwolf when you consider eleven million people owe it, plus annual interest. Not even Brother Obama and his honkies in Congress can rack up debt at that rate. He only racks up a Trillion a year, but that’s for 300 million people, about 28 times the population of Greece.
But then, this is just the beginning of the headache. Because Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, are also in similar straits. Not as dour, perhaps, but not much better. And Spain has a population of 45 million, and the fifth-largest economy in Europe, so if Spain goes down, then the Euro will be demi-castrated, and we will start to see the beginnings of the end for this centralized experiment in forcing “brotherhood” on over 350 million divers people, most of whom have been butchering each other by the thousands, for thousands of years, over thousands of yards of soil. And judging by the animosity which economic problems bring out in people, and the latent nationalism which still infects most of Europe (witness the soccer fan behavior, and the continuing passion for competitive nationalistic sporting events), the “socialist ideal” of bailing out your brother at the cost of higher gas, food and jeans, is one that will quickly bring the “Deutschland uber Alles” pack to its hind legs again.
On top of that, Italy is also getting further into its perpetual fiscal deficits, and will probably soon be terminal instead of just very ill. So perhaps one should Italianly pluralise the acronym to PIGSI.
And Europe’s bankruptcy is all the more amazing when you consider that the American taxpayer has been primarily footing the bill for European and NATO defence costs for decades now. The American Defense spending bills approved almost unanimously by the Democrat Party members in Congress for decades, has helped to keep America a society with many poor people, and with a crumbling infrastructure, while Europeans get the best in free medical care, modern trains, and all kinds of Socialist perks not even available in America. Truly the American taxpayer has been ripped off on Defense spending by the collaborative efforts of the Democrat and Republican parties for years, as well as by the European consumer. Their actions amount to a flagitious moral crime, though they may skirt illegality according to the definition. But public education has so dulled the American’s mind, that most of them fully support the mulcting of their wealth for the benefit of Euro-Socialists.
The crashing of the Euro will be a sharp lesson to the world’s peoples of the dangers of Keynesian, fractional reserve banking, as well as having a central bank that can destroy the value of paper currency by fiat at will. They will once again learn that they have been brainwashed, as they finally watch the inevitable destruction of European Socialism, after their saying it would succeed and be a shining City on a Hill for the last 90 years. How quickly are the proud laid low.
The abattoir is open; the slaughterer has had his three cups of cafe au lait, and is all hepped up and ready for business, and the first Euro-PIGS are coming down the chute.
As the Mob’s slogan goes, “Pay or die”.
Hoooooooooooooooowwwwwwwww! — Silverwolf
Tags: Democrat Party, Euro, Euro currency, Europe, Germany, Greece, Ireland, PIGS, PIGSI, Portugal, Socialism, Spain, U.S. Defense spending
Silverwolf:The Lobo Breed 
February 13, 2010 at 1:28 am |
Wow, more scare tactics from the Right, and it’s rather loose definition of the term ‘Socialism’.
February 13, 2010 at 2:16 am |
Some would evidently like to deny that what Europe has is Socialism. It certainly is not free-market, hard-money, laissez-faire capitalism. So what would they call it? And when tens of thousands of investors dump billions of Euros in a day, well, I guess that’s just a scare tactic of the Right, right? — Silverwolf
February 13, 2010 at 3:05 pm |
Silverwolf – It is the one thing that brings me comfort right now – the hope that the eurozone will either crack, or that we will become the most fiscally responsible part of the entire world. It is looking more and more like Greece is on their own (though you never now), according to rumours because Angela Merkel refuse to see her citizens pay for lazy greek state workers.
The only thing that needs preserving of the euro-zone is freetrade policy, and the beauty of it is that if the eurozone cracks, business all over Europe are still going to be used to not having to pay tariffs on import and export, so the pressure against re-imposing such measures will be enormous.
It is a thing of strange, frightening beauty – the falling of welfare socialism into its own pit of irresponsibility. Keep howling,
//hpx
February 13, 2010 at 8:46 pm |
hpx83 — Yes, the swan dive of Socialism carves a pretty picture against the diving-board of history, as it plashes into the cesspool of false economic systems, never to re-surface again.
If mankind can move away from such a system, not only because he clearly and logically understands the economic reasons why it will not work, no matter what “reforms” are proposed, because it is inherently false, but also because people must learn to adopt, to use Alan Watts’ phrase, “the Wisdom of Insecurity” — then mankind can, for the first time, truly experience a Freedom that would have been unheard of in the days of Vermeer. He spent months painting a photograph; the American teenager snaps thousands of photos in a day, and visual imagery has largely lost its magic for most youth. And think of the bookkeeping misery which occupied the complete life energies of so many millions of clerks in pre-20th century Europe. The typists thought they really had it so much better than when people had to write by hand, but now we pity the typist, and even the Neanderthal person who reads documents on paper. So technology has freed man in so many ways that Jefferson couldn’t really have dreamt of, though his Deism, along with the other Deists amongst the Founding Fathers of the American Libertarian Revolution, seemed to optimistically point towards a golden age, when men would be liberated.
Well, that Jeffersonian day may have begun with the cracks in the Euro, for it is really a much bigger issue than a currency. They are the cracks in an entire Economic Ideology, the dogma of Socialism.
Of course, they may still yet duct tape over the problem for a little while, but the Euro is like one of those old jalopies in the John Steinbeck novels of the dustbowl and California 30s — held together with spit and bailing wire.
But, oh, it is a sad sight indeed: Silverwolf just saw a Keynesian suffering from rabies running down the street in a delirium: he was shouting out that the crisis could be solved if the Portuguese Escudo was re-established outside the Eurozone, and then all major world currencies would be pegged to it.
Poor man. The animal pound will probably pick him up soon. — Silverwolf
February 25, 2010 at 5:37 pm |
Maybe Bernanke should make himself useful and look into how the US Government hides its true debt. Greece is not our ptoblem.