The EU is heading towards the nightmare society envisioned by Ayn Rand in 'Atlas Shrugged'
Many thanks to Muffled Vociferations Blog for alerting me to Vaclav Klaus's recent speech in South America, linked here, from which comes this quote:
Another good discussion of the problems in Portugal and Spain comes from Michael Jennings on Samizdata, linked here, with a very pertinent closing sentence. Or as Ayn Rand said in her book:
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
The second reason for the European economic problem is the quality, productiveness and efficiency of its economic and social system. A seemingly friendly and non-demanding, excessively paternalistic and, as a consequence, not sufficiently productive economic and social system, called “die soziale Markwirtschaft” (or social-democratism), dominates in Europe. This system with its generous social benefits weakened motivation, shortened working hours and life employment, prolonged years of studying, diminished the supply of labour (both at macrolevel and structurally), created bottlenecks and shortages.
Europeans prefer leisure to performance, security to risk-taking, paternalism to free markets, collectivism (group entitlements) to individualism. They have always been more risk-averse than Americans but the difference continues to grow. Also freedom seems to have a very low priority there. It seems that Europeans are not interested in capitalism and free markets and that they do not understand that their today’s behavior undermines the very institutions that made their past success possible. They are eager to very intensively defend their non-economic freedoms, or better to say the easiness, looseness, laxity and permissiveness of modern, or perhaps post-modern European society, but when it comes to their economic freedoms, they are quite indifferent.
The inefficiency and unsustainability of this system was later “reinforced” by the gradual acceptance of green ideology, of environmentalism. This process started in the 1970s, but reached its peak, and its economic devastating effects now, in the era of global warming (or climate change) alarmism.
Europeans prefer leisure to performance, security to risk-taking, paternalism to free markets, collectivism (group entitlements) to individualism. They have always been more risk-averse than Americans but the difference continues to grow. Also freedom seems to have a very low priority there. It seems that Europeans are not interested in capitalism and free markets and that they do not understand that their today’s behavior undermines the very institutions that made their past success possible. They are eager to very intensively defend their non-economic freedoms, or better to say the easiness, looseness, laxity and permissiveness of modern, or perhaps post-modern European society, but when it comes to their economic freedoms, they are quite indifferent.
The inefficiency and unsustainability of this system was later “reinforced” by the gradual acceptance of green ideology, of environmentalism. This process started in the 1970s, but reached its peak, and its economic devastating effects now, in the era of global warming (or climate change) alarmism.
Another good discussion of the problems in Portugal and Spain comes from Michael Jennings on Samizdata, linked here, with a very pertinent closing sentence. Or as Ayn Rand said in her book:
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
Labels: Atlas Shrugged, Portugal, Vaclav Klaus
posted by Martin at 10:29 AM
1 Comments:
I read the linked article with great interest.The EUcrats really loves high speed rail (at our expense of course).
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