Oh, to not be EUROpe
This graph sets out how catastrophically bad youth unemployment is in debt-ridden EUROpe. Meanwhile, in Oz, unemployment is holding steady at 4.9%.
The euro was a bad idea: lots of economists said so at the time, but the EUrosuperstate decided that it could make it work in a Triumph of the Will. As folk discuss the odds of various states (starting with Greece) going bankrupt, how is that working for them?
So, what we have is states whose labour market regulation block young people from getting jobs, even though plunging fertility rates mean there are proportionately fewer and fewer of them (which means, of course, that their voting power also shrinks) while more and more baby boomers retire, ramping up the pension obligations. No jobs and a lifetime of expanding debt obligations. What a wonderful prospect for young Europeans.
So, why would they bother to stay? You can block them from getting jobs, and saddle them with expanding tax liabilities if they do manage to score one, but you cannot actually force them to stay. Meanwhile, the Middle East produces lots of unemployed young people in societies much more pathologically mismanaged than Europe's. One can imagine young Europeans fleeing the looming tax increases and lack of prospects to North America and the Antipodes while mostly Muslim Middle Easterners continue to press into Europe.
This is a recipe for the politics of cultural-panic nationalism gaining even more strength than it currently has. It is already manifesting in Greece. Mass murderer Breivik in Norway may be a zero empathy obsessed loner, but he is an extreme version of a trend in politics that will continue to expand. His video is classic cultural panic nationalism. (In historian George Mosse's useful term, such is a "scavenger ideology", scooping up whatever rhetoric or themes it finds useful.)
The end of the expansive European welfare state might end up being quite ugly.
The euro was a bad idea: lots of economists said so at the time, but the EUrosuperstate decided that it could make it work in a Triumph of the Will. As folk discuss the odds of various states (starting with Greece) going bankrupt, how is that working for them?
So, what we have is states whose labour market regulation block young people from getting jobs, even though plunging fertility rates mean there are proportionately fewer and fewer of them (which means, of course, that their voting power also shrinks) while more and more baby boomers retire, ramping up the pension obligations. No jobs and a lifetime of expanding debt obligations. What a wonderful prospect for young Europeans.
So, why would they bother to stay? You can block them from getting jobs, and saddle them with expanding tax liabilities if they do manage to score one, but you cannot actually force them to stay. Meanwhile, the Middle East produces lots of unemployed young people in societies much more pathologically mismanaged than Europe's. One can imagine young Europeans fleeing the looming tax increases and lack of prospects to North America and the Antipodes while mostly Muslim Middle Easterners continue to press into Europe.
This is a recipe for the politics of cultural-panic nationalism gaining even more strength than it currently has. It is already manifesting in Greece. Mass murderer Breivik in Norway may be a zero empathy obsessed loner, but he is an extreme version of a trend in politics that will continue to expand. His video is classic cultural panic nationalism. (In historian George Mosse's useful term, such is a "scavenger ideology", scooping up whatever rhetoric or themes it finds useful.)
The end of the expansive European welfare state might end up being quite ugly.