Gambling addicts, progressives, and Euro socialist always believe they only need one more stake and everything will work out fine

Why is Europe so fed up?

The gambler always knows if he could just find a stake, the next horse is a winner! Just as the progressives, and Euro socialists believe they are merely a $1 trillion deficit away from redemption. Surprisingly, it never seems to work. 

"A recent survey by Eurobarometer found that more than half of young Europeans aged 16-30 felt marginalised in their own country due to the economic crisis.

For now, most of Europe’s economies have returned to growth thanks to the ECB’s injection of stimulus, but down on main-street where youth unemployment tops 40 per cent in Greece, Italy, Spain and Croatia and more than 25 per cent in France, Belgium and Portugal, no-one is jumping for joy.

Italy’s banks remain riddled with debt, Spain is once again breaching its pledge to keep fiscal deficits below 3 per cent and Portugal’s Left-coalition government is fuelling doubts over the long-term viability of Portugal’s place in the Eurozone.

With national governments fragmenting because they are unable to deliver better livelihoods, it is not surprising that the supra-national politics of the Eurozone are now showing increasingly visible signs of stress too. Eurogroup finance ministers have reached a compromise deal over Greek debt – now standing at 180 per cent of GDP – but unlocking the latest tranche of bailout billions has only kicked the can a little way further down the street, keep Greece on medium-term life support as a member of the Eurozone."

Really? How could that be. Decades of binging on debt, and American military protection allowing the European countries to spend ever more on pensions, medical care, and safety net has finally caused the continent to come a cropper? Mon Dieu? Who would have guessed? Notice how the nations most torn asunder by the crisis are the ones with the most restrictive and coercive business environments? Socialism is perfectly fine until the other peoples money runs out, then it turns ugly, quick. Venezuela is the cautionary tale. 

"Meanwhile Germany continues to cling to the economic model of the Swabian Hausfrau - south-west Germany's thrifty housewife - imposing austerity on the rest of Europe by hoarding vast surpluses that almost everyone else agrees should be invested in the infrastructure and education that might kick-start a European recovery."

Spoken like an unreacted Brit socialist, sharing money by "investing" it in infrastructure and education is a sure way to expend the resource, without any evidence that things would change. These countries have been doing this for years, why would more help?

"With economic policy-makers now talking again about dishing out "helicopter money" (free cash) when the next Eurozone downturn strikes, Germany’s powerful finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble has made no effort to conceal his differences with Mario Draghi, the ECB’s Italian head. Mr Schäuble blames the ECB’s money-printing and zero interest-rates for simultaneously destroying the value of German savings and fueling the rise of the far-Right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) whose success is currently rocking German politics."

Draghi is the fool here. The man never saw an idiotic policy he could pass up.

Nationalism, and immigration are both problems the Europeans need to address. European Nationalism is a deadly threat which if unaddressed will all but certainly result in catastrophic consequences. And we have written about Europe's inability to deal with immigration.

Europeans have no idea on how to assimilate immigrants, as Sweden so poignantly shows by segregating swimming

America would enjoy a reasonable trading partner in Europe, but that seems unlikely to happen. The entire edifice is slowly reducing the southern European nations while only Germany, the Nordic, and German speaking countries, and Britain seem to be able to function in the current Euro arrangement. The rest are subjected to routine gales of economic destabilization. All of the Southern European countries are in what we could call a depression, with shockingly high unemployment, and weak economies. From this there is no cure, there is no out, but the consequences of leaving the Eurozone seem even worse, at least to the politician. The graft, and corruption now is great, while in a new poorer economy leaving would create would be more limited, and so the politician fights tooth and nail to remain in the EU.

This is an epic and preventable tragedy.