EU Referendum posts a video from some clever German reporters.

Apparently, members of the EU Parliament make about $275,000 per year (more than the German Chancellor, the reporters point out). They get this high salary despite exercising little power (most sovereign functions are still carried out by national legislatures), and despite the fact that most EU citizens apparently don’t really care much about the body (turnout for EU elections is low and declining).

In order to get their full salary, however, the representatives have to actually show up at work. These reporters staked-out the location where representatives sign-in, and found dozens showing up early in the morning (with luggage!) to sign in so they could immediately take off.

The “Green Party” representative is particularly funny - she heads directly back into the elevator immediately upon seeing the camera crew.

At least the Irish are noticing.

From The Telegraph:

The Association of European Chambers of Commerce in Brussels warned that the transatlantic gap had widened yet further in the past five years by all key measures, despite the pledge by EU leaders at the 2000 Lisbon summit to transform Europe into the world’s “most dynamic knowledge-based economy” by the end of the decade.

The EU-wide umbrella group, known asEurochambres said the EU’s overall employment rate was still stuck at levels attained by the United States in 1978, chiefly due to an incentive structure that discourages women from working and prompts early retirement by those in their fifties.

It found that the European Union’s research and development levels were achieved by America as long ago as 1979, while the lag time on per capita income is 18 years.

George Will:

…What Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” — the idea that government can know the future’s possibilities and can and should control the future’s unfolding — is the left’s agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state’s supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left’s hostility to markets. And to automobiles — people going wherever they want whenever they want.

Today’s “green left” is the old “red left” revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict, but thought that history’s violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away.

The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitats, humans’ living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything — carbon….

It’s worth noting that alliances between “green” and “red” political parties are a very real phenomenon. The left-most mainstream parties in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Finland formed the Nordic Green Left Alliance in 2004. Those parties are also joined in the European United Left / Nordic Green Left alliance in the European Parliament with The Spanish Communist Party, The French Communist Party, The Portuguese Communist Party, and The Communist Refoundation Party of Italy. For good measure, the Sinn Fein, the political arm of the terrorist Irish Republican Army, recently joined the EUL/NGL.

What are environmentalists and communists (and terrorists) doing together in political unions? Obviously, they share the same fundamental goals - repression of the individual in favor of supreme state power.

Sounds like the UN. Or maybe the party of Dollar Bill Jefferson, Alcee Hastings, and John Murtha.

From The Telegraph:

Britain is experiencing the worst “brain drain” of any country as highly qualified professionals settle abroad, an authoritative international study showed yesterday.

Record numbers of Britons are leaving - many of them doctors, teachers and engineers - in the biggest exodus for almost 50 years…

…No other nation is losing so many qualified people, it points out. Britain has now lost more than one in 10 of its most skilled citizens, while overall only Mexico has had more people emigrate…

…The most popular destinations are English-speaking countries such as Australia, America, Canada and New Zealand…

We’ve written before about mass emmigration out of the EU, mostly to the US. In June we wrote:

…A tiny number of Americans give up their citizenship every year. According to the NYT, emmigration from the US reached “a high of about 2,000 during the Vietnam War in the early 1970s.”

Today most Americans who give up their citizenship do so for tax reasons. In 2006 the IRS counted 509 (year to date through 12/18/06) including non-citizen resident aliens returning home. In 2002 it was 403 departures. That’s 2-3x the number killed by lightning strikes every year. On a per-capita basis, emmigration from Germany is about 1100x more common than immigration from the US. Its 3300x for Sweden vs the US.

We closed the post with a quote from a Washing Times article:

Americans who think that the European welfare state is the model to follow would do well to ponder the question why, if Europe is so wonderful, Europeans are fleeing from it. European welfare systems are redistribution mechanisms, taking money from skilled and educated Europeans in order to give it to nonskilled newcomers from the Third World.

From Foreign Policy:

In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe’s economies prosper or continue to be left behind….

 ….“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues. Because the 21st century begins with “an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth],” any future prosperity “depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.” Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.” This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.

I like the fact that the French call capitalism “neoliberal”, sticking to the classical definition of liberalism, the mirror opposite of American Liberalism.

Click to enlarge this graphic from the article:

I looked up Histoire du XXe siècle on amazon.fr. Volume 3 is entitled Histoire du XXe siècle : Tome 3: vers la mondialisation et le XXIe siècle, roughly History of the 20th Century: Volume 3: Towards Globalization and the 21st Century. Hmmm….what image would go well on the cover of a French textbook on globalization….

Great article in New Jersey’s The Record.

No politician would ever run on a platform that increased unemployment, caused parents to have fewer children or made Americans sicker and poorer. Yet, that is exactly what will result if New Jersey passes paid family leave, yet another government-sponsored benefit program…

…But the experience of Europe tells us otherwise. According to various sources, Europe’s unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent, is almost twice that of the United States. Moreover, Europeans are simply poorer than we are, with the European gross domestic product per capita at $29,400, versus $43,500 in the United States…

…A recent Wall Street Journal article on the Swedish disability program noted that Swedes are the healthiest people in the world – and yet the country has the world’s highest rate of disability. Assar Lindbeck, one of Sweden’s best-known economists, notes that the social programs have made it acceptable to live off others and not to work…

…The experience of Europe tells us mandated programs result in fewer jobs, declining families and eroding work ethics. The free market approach may not satisfy politicians’ need to say they solved a problem. Rather, it works quietly, over time, creating multiple solutions, with some working better than others. Over time, the bad ones are rejected and the good ones are free to further evolve.

Read the whole thing.

Nicholas Stern is a British economist who has spent most of his professional life working for various governments and international bureaucracies. Like Keynes before him, this Brit doesn’t really believe in market economics, and is always looking for excuses to replace free exchange with coercion.

Friday he wrote a piece in The Guardian entitled (can’t make this up) Bali: now the rich must pay in reference to the UN climate conference at a very expensive tropical resort in Indonesia. From the article:

The Bali summit on climate change, which starts next week, will seek to lay the foundations for a new global agreement on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause rising temperatures and climate change. Ambitious targets for emission reduction must be at the heart of that agreement, together with effective market mechanisms that encourage emission trading between countries, rich and poor. The problem of climate change involves a fundamental failure of markets: those who damage others by emitting greenhouse gases generally do not pay. Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen…

Collectivists like Stern love talking about “market failures.” Funny how they rarely talk about government failures (except, of course, when they think government has failed to restrain markets adequately).

…The evidence on the seriousness of the risks from inaction is now overwhelming. We risk damage on a scale larger than the two world wars of the past century. The problem is global and the response must be collaboration on a global scale. The rich countries must lead the way in taking action…

In Eurospeak “rich countries” means the United States. Despite its enormous size and diversity, and the tremendous rate of immigration from 3rd world countries, the US is 48% wealthier, on a GDP per capita basis, than the EU. This is because percisely because we don’t have dim bureaucrats like Stern directing our affairs.

…The evidence on the seriousness of the risks from inaction is now overwhelming. We risk damage on a scale larger than the two world wars of the past century. The problem is global and the response must be collaboration on a global scale. The rich countries must lead the way in taking action…

Word of advice to European bureaucrats trying to dictate policy to the US - mentioning WWI and WWII is very poor salesmanship. Those wars are only examples of how incredibly incompetent European leaders can be, and how quickly the broader population can be whiped into a savage frenzy. It was European scientists who invented the idea of eugenics and European economists who invented the idea of Communism. Those two policies alone left the blood of a couple hundred million people in the 20th century on the hands of arrogant European elites.

Good luck to them with their latest pseudo-scientific, pseudo-economic contraption. No doubt we’ll have to bail them out again in a few decades when some climate alarmist true believers over there start filling up mass graves yet again.

Remember this story next time someone is regailing you with tales of the EU’s sophisticated social policies.

Some background: Since Romania was admitted to the EU on 1/1/07 about 500,000 Romanians have moved to nearby Italy. This migration completely legal, all EU citizens ostensibly enjoying free movement within the Union (under EU Parliament Directive 2004/38/EC).

Many of these migrants are economic refugees - Romania’s GDP per capita is 1/6 that of Italy, and 1/5 that of the EU overall. Not surprisingly, an increase in violent crime is attributed to the migrants in the places they’ve settled.

Recently an Italian woman was attacked, robbed, and raped by a Romanian migrant in Rome. She died from her wounds shortly thereafter. The attack has focused Italy’s fury against the migrants.

From London’s The Daily Mail:

…Near to collapse, the dead woman’s husband was hugged by friends and family as her elderly parents followed behind the coffin.

“It’s not fair,” he repeated again and again, weeping quietly. “Why? Why? Why?”

The people of Italy are no longer prepared to wait for answers. Amid fury over the soaring number of murders, rapes and robberies by Romanians, the sole topic of conversation among many Italians throughout the city last week was the growing threat posed by stranieri (immigrants) and dark talk of vengeance.

It did not remain talk for long. By last night, a week of violence showed no sign of abating after a spate of bombings and attacks by armed gangs, many of them joined by older, middle-class people, who roamed the streets of Italy looking for Eastern European immigrants.

Leaping from their scooters, one group rounded on four Romanians begging outside a supermarket in the centre of Rome, beating them with sticks and stabbing them.

The Romanians were left unconscious; and they are still in hospital.

As other Italians doused immigrant shacks with petrol and set them ablaze, scores of Romanians were knifed in scenes repeated from Milan to Naples…”

The article doesn’t put too fine a point on it, but these aren’t just regular Romanians. They are Roma, or Romani, “Gypsies” - an ethnic minority Europeans have been trying to eradicate, in fits and starts, for hundreds of years.

The vigilante response is maybe not all that surprising - maybe just another flare-up of the internecine violence so common among those quaint Europeans. But consider the response of the Italian government, with apparent EU approval.

Premier Romano Prodi’s government declared that new legislation would be introduced to expel anyone suspected of being a “threat to public safety”.

There would be no need for proof of a criminal record or a trial, and there would be no appeal.

Most observers believed that the EU would step in to block the laws and defend the principle that EU residents can travel freely among member states.

But amazingly, earlier this week, the European Commission said the Italian government was within its rights, so long as each case was treated individually and not used to discriminate against any particular nationality or group…

…The Italians, on the other hand, have wasted no time. This week squads of armed police, backed by helicopters, moved into hundreds of camps set up by an estimated half a million people who have poured into the country this year.

While Romanians tried to flee across waste ground, police bulldozed shacks and arrested hundreds of people, ferrying them to 13 detention centres on the outskirts of Rome…

Helicopters? Bulldozers? Detention centers?

Its impossible to imagine something like this happening in modern America. The US doesn’t even have the stomach to evict masses of illegal immigrants - as EU citizens these Romani have a legal right to live anywhere from Rome to Stockholm to Dublin.

From the end of WWI to the end of WWII about 1,000,000 African Americans migrated from the Deep South to the Upper Midwest. Most were economic refugees, filling war-time jobs in rapidly growing industrial cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit. Some were fleeing the KKK, Jim Crow, or just the boll weevil.

They weren’t always warmly welcomed by the incumbent locals. The worst symptom of the inability to assimilate were the Chicago and Detroit race riots. But after the 1967 Detroit Riots blacks weren’t put into detention camps. They weren’t chased back to Mississippi or Alabama by helicopters and bulldozers.

But we aren’t talking about America here. The 12 year old mass graves of Srebrenica are less than 150 mile from the Italian border - closer than New York to Albany. The same Serbian government who’s forces filled those graves is now an Associate Member of the EU. The Europeans were unable (or unwilling) to quell yet another outbreak of genocidal barbarity themselves. It stopped only after Clinton called in airstrikes, at great expense to the United States and, notably, against the wishes of the UN Security Council.

The EU is an economically stratified federation, a rich west using a poor east for cheap labor and as a security buffer against the Russians. Nine million Swedes may have a nice government healthcare system, but auslanders, even from elsewhere in the EU, aren’t welcome. Like so many collectivist systems, the EU relies on a permanent underclass, fixed and enforced by the government.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus spoke on threats to freedom at Cato this March.

Klaus presents what he considers the three primary threats to freedom today:

1) “Popular and fashionable ‘isms’ which…put various issues, visions, plans and projects ahead of individual freedom and liberty. It is social-democratism (which is nothing else than a milder and softer version of communism), it is human-rightism (based on the idea of mostly positive rights applicable all over the world), it is internationalism, multiculturalism, europeism, feminism, environmentalism and other similar ideologies.”

2) A “tendency towards denationalization of countries and towards world-wide supranationalism and global governance…Freedom and democracy…cannot be secured without the parliamentary democracy within a clearly defined state territory.”

The third is environmentalism. (Full comments):

The third main threat to individual freedom and liberty I see in environmentalism. To be specific, I do understand the concerns about eventual environmental degradation but I do see a problem in environmentalism as an ideology.

Environmentalism only pretends to deal with environmental protection. Behind their people- and nature-friendly terminology, the adherents to this ideology make ambitious attempts to radically reorganize and change the world, human society, all of us and our behavior, as well as our values.

There is no doubt that it is our duty to protect rationally the nature for the future generations. The followers of the environmentalist ideology, however, keep presenting to us various catastrophic scenarios with the intention to persuade us to implement their ideas about us and about the whole human society. This is not only unfair but extremely dangerous. What is, in my view, even more dangerous, is the quasi-scientific form that their many times refuted forecasts have taken upon themselves.

What belongs to this ideology?

- disbelief in the power of the invisible hands of free market and belief in the omnipotence state dirigism;

- disregard for the role of important and powerful economic mechanisms and institutions – primarily that of property rights and prices – for an effective protection of nature;

- misunderstanding of the meaning of resources, of the difference between the potential natural resource and the real one, that may be used in the economy;

- Malthusian pessimism over the technical progress;

- belief in the dominance of externalities in human activities;

- promotion of the so-called “precautionary principle“, which maximizes the risk aversion without paying attention to the costs;

- underestimation of the long-term income and welfare growth, which results in a fundamental shift of demand towards environmental protection (this is demonstrated by the so-called Environmental Kuznets Curve);

- erroneous discounting of the future, demonstrated so clearly by the highly publicized Stern-Report a few months ago.

All of these views are associated with social sciences, not with natural sciences. This is why environmentalism – unlike scientific ecology – does not belong to the natural sciences but is to be classified as an ideology. This fact is, however, not understood by the common people and by numerous politicians.

The hypothesis of global warming and the role of man in this process is the last and till this day the most powerful embodiment of the environmental ideology. It has brought along many important “advantages” for the environmentalists:

- an empirical analyses of this phenomenon is very complicated due to the complexity of global climate and the mix of various long-, medium-, and short-term trends (and causes);

- their argumentation is not based on simple empirical measurements or laboratory experiments, but on sophisticated model experiments working with a range of ill-founded assumptions that are usually hidden and not sufficiently understood;

- the opponents of this hypothesis have to accept the fact that in this case we are in the world of non-internalized externalities;

- people tend to notice and remember only extraordinary climate phenomena but not normal developments and slow long-term trends and processes.

It is not my intention, here and now, to present arguments for the refutation of this hypothesis. What I find much more important is to protest against the efforts of the environmentalists to manipulate people. Their recommendations would take us back into the era of statism and restricted freedom. It is therefore our task to draw a clear line and differentiate between the ideological environmentalism and the scientific ecology.  

Of course each of these three threats is just a subset of a broader ideology. Leftism. I think its fair to say everything he sees as a threat to freedom is embraced by each of the DNC presidential candidates.

His prepared comments end at 22:30, the rest is Q&A. Starting around 29:00 he makes an a point concerning environmental improvements in his own country since the fall of communism - he attributes them not to environmental policy but the re-introduction of property rights.

The full transcript is here.

We’ve been fascinated with Klaus for a while, and have written about him several times (here, here, here, here, here, and here)