Welcome to 2011 – and despite what some may feel, very many French men-and-women-on-Le Métro believe we’re not out of the financial woods yet.
The Europe and Euro-battering hurricane now hitting our Western shores is of course directly related to this critical little bit of North Atlantic history.
The annotated TIME magazine piece from December 2009, worth “cutting out and keeping” (electronically that is), can be viewed here where the slideshow text has been reprinted in copy and paste format. To view the full 29-page document in the slideshow below use the scroller on the righthand side of the box.
And government-backed efforts to beat the 2007/8 meltdown contain the seeds of the next episode in this ongoing crisis because now the too-big-to-fail banks have been reassured they continue to believe bets in their financial casinos are one-way wagers.
Here’s Johan Norberg a Cato Institute Senior Fellow addressing the Cato Institute in June 2010:
“’The problem with socialism,’ Lady Thatcher once said, ‘is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.’ Right now we are running out of our children’s money, and our grandchildren’s money. We are assuming we will have a never-ending supply of borrowed money, and we have no backup plan if this supply chokes up. Things may feel safe at the moment. We can still borrow easily from international markets. So could Lehman Brothers on 12 September 2008 — the day before the bank imploded.”
Norberg’s book — Financial Fiasco — has been turned into a film, here’s the trailer:
and here ‘s where to buy the full film
Others have a different view and if you want a scientifically Marxist analysis of the crisis, here is a lengthy paper by Dr Ross Morrow, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney (as published in the Journal of the Communist Party of Australia).
Alexis De Tocqueville
The crisis and the lost decades that threaten to lie ahead may well be seen in some quarters as a welcome opportunity for the always restless, social engineering Eurocrat elite to impose – in the name of equality — more “taxing, regulating, busy-bodying and meddling” on a harshly-done-by citizenry.
So where is Alexis De Tocqueville when we need him?
He, you see, worried about despotism prompted by a distorted definition of equality: ” The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
“Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.”
(H/T: James Delingpole)
See other French-News-Online reporting
No related posts.