Categories
Accountability folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard responsibility

Too Big for Breaches

“Any reporter who has covered Europe in the last decade has written a dozen articles or more,” The New York Times informs us, “about how one crisis or another has exposed the fundamental unsustainability of the European Union.”

I hadn’t noticed. Until recently, haven’t reporters and commentators been downplaying Europe’s looming crisis? But they cannot pretend “far right” separatist, decentralist and nationalist movements are marginal any longer, not after strong showings for Geert Wilders in The Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, and the Brexit vote. 

Now everybody seems to be panicking. 

Even the Times is half-​predicting an end to what it calls the “European Experiment.”

The Times identifies the tension as arising from “calls for keeping out secondary migrants and demands to keep internal European borders open. It’s a version of the contradiction within the European Union itself: between an open union and a collection of sovereign states.”

Beneath all the brouhaha about freedom of movement across breached borders lies the real contradiction: between massive welfare states on the one hand and, on the other, freedom of movement, speech and all the rest.*

When governments offer freebies, they entice people into un-​productive or at least sub-​productive lifestyles. Which is not sustainable, especially when extensive. How many productive people must support how many unproductive people?

Then throw those domestic programs open to millions of migrants who lack even rudimentary language and First World skills? That’s how states subsidize their societies’ destruction.

Europe’s governments are way too big for their border breaches.

If you want traditional freedoms, you have to pare down government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


*Between social democracy (socialism lite) and the old liberal order.

 

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Categories
free trade & free markets

How They Did It

For 70 days, 33 Chilean miners were trapped a half mile below the surface of the earth —  “swallowed into the bowels of hell,” as one miner says — waiting for rescue. A billion viewers watched as they finally began to emerge to safety.

A fierce determination at both ends of the slowly constructed shaft aided the rescue. The miners had to outlast the first few weeks of despair, when they had scant information about the rescue mission. Throughout the ordeal they maintained the mine and their own morale. The rescuers had to figure out how to first get supplies to the miners and then create the narrow but stable shaft through which the miners could escape, as all 33 of them did.

A less-​noted aspect of the story is that the rescue could not have happened without technology that did not exist even a quarter century ago. This included everything from the powerful drill bit donated by Center Rock Inc., a Pennsylvania company, to copper-​fiber socks that consumed foot bacteria. But especially that drill bit.

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger observes that Center Rock’s drill bit exists because of the firm’s pursuit of profit in an economy where pursuit of profit is possible. It exists because of what Henninger calls the “profit=innovation” dynamic. Indeed, capitalism saves lives every day; markets make our lives better and sometimes makes our lives possible. 

You don’t have to mine very hard to get a moral out of the story.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.