Off To Your Room Kids

In the US, it's all about jobs. So you might think that the rest of the developed world has a jobs problem. It doesn’t.

Let’s take a look. What can we learn from this?

In an earlier sketch (World Order Reversed) we noted that election results in the UK and Europe have moved decidedly right, this after lessons learned the hard way. From that piece: “If you look across Europe, the political center of gravity has clearly moved to the right,’ notes Charles Kupchan, sr fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, ‘There were deep and broad structural problems of the economy that Europeans had to tackle.” The nearest role model was the UK under Thatcher. “Now that process,” continues Kupchan, “of undoing large state-centered economies is moving to the Continent.”

Europe, the UK and Australia (5.1% unempl.) are already looking to be in reasonable shape after the crisis, at least if measured by joblessness, which is most cases is now at pre-crisis levels. But of course not the US. Why?

From the recent IMF annual meeting, the mood as one headline suggested is that, “ Jobless American threatens to bring us all down.”

My goodness sakes alive folks, they’re looking at us as cripples! The IMF is lecturing the US? This can’t be true! Ah, but yes it is. With policies that look reckless in comparison with the rest of the developed world, why not?

There is nothing new under the sun. Rich Rahn at the Cato Institute: “Mankind seems to be programmed not to remember the reasons for economic success and failure - and these lessons seem to need to be relearned every few years. The normal course of events is for free and prosperous economies ... to move toward less freedom - more government spending, taxation and regulation - until the burden of government brings growth to a halt or near-halt.”

Well Rich ol buddy, maybe not “mankind” but certainly the US left, suffering as they do from amnesia. So like children at the dinner table, making nothing but noise and a mess, they were scolded; they are now being put to their room.

But guess what? The kiddies rarely learn a thing.

This dear readers explains the cycle; this in fact is why progress is retarded, moving only in ratchet fashion yet with slippage along the way. We all suffer for it.

A party controlled by radicals at the national level, gained traction; the rest is history. Using gov’t in the fields of stimulus and health, and with union payoffs BO, Pelosi, Frank and the rest are simply repeating early errors of the UK and Europe (errors now being reversed).

But then we all know that don’t we? Yes indeedee, there must be something else and there is. BO’s gang, being not completely stupid understood that neither health nor stimulus would deliver in the conventional sense anyway. That wasn’t what this was about. It was about leveraging a crisis for a long hibernating statist agenda, an agenda so firmly welded to the far left’s consciousness that many where willing to self destruct - hari kari sytle, off the cliffs - to see to its fruition.


Robert Craven