- Tom Wolfe
This post at Chicagoboyz is really interesting, and really disturbing. Especially this:
The idea of high debt levels and high levels of youth unemployment will also likely result in some philosophical soul-searching. This debt isn’t being invested in structural improvements and productivity enhancements; it is being used for social transfers today to other citizens and to employ a vast government bureaucracy of selected citizens who are generally immune to market discipline (getting fired, working hard) while the unemployed youth sit idle. When the infeasibility of this system becomes apparent, how can they explain it to the jobless that their prospects must continue to be stunted in order to pay for an overseer class of government employees? The act of finding “real” jobs for youth will also take us back to a more entrepreneurial view of the world; hiring citizens as bureaucrats in lieu of a productive economy doesn’t work and something else will ultimately need to take its place.What's disturbing is the idea that some entepreneurial energy may go into inflaming Europe's youth. When European anti-government movements coalesce, blood runs in the street.
As I've said before, nobody does jackboots in the street like the Euros.
ReplyDeleteWith globalization, we see here in New England inmigration as a response to the impact of underemployment and under-investment in young people, even in relatively cosmopolitan non-european societies like Brazil, where job opportunities are so scarce for the educated middle class that it's more productive to become a member of the illegal immigrant underclass in the US rather than to starve in the name of maintaining social status at home. With this kind of social disorganization in the most developed of the third- world nations, the non-underclass non-elites of the European welfare states can not be far behind in the winnowing down of choices for employment. To me, this makes revolution more probable. The Europeans, for all their herd mentality, have a deep affinity for violent response to the crossing of ideological pressure gradients, and it's not that far under the surface, in my opinion.
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