All over Europe, state employees demand to be exempted from the austerity measures that the private sector must make. Beneath all the slogans about fairness and compassion lurks a remarkably selfish sentiment: ‘Make future generations pay my pension!’
Without any alternative narrative to explain their present discontents, Europeans blame the downturn on ‘cuts’, ‘bankers’ and ‘deregulation’. The politician who tries to point out that spending is massively higher than it was three years ago, that we could expropriate every banker entirely and still make barely a dent in the national debt, and that financial services are perhaps the most regulated sector of the economy, is liable to have dead animals lobbed in his direction.
Europe is in a downward spiral. The worse things get, the more its people vote for all the things that brought it to its present unhappy condition: wastrel spending, unsustainable borrowing, punitive taxation, deeper integration.
Not since we joined the EEC 40 years ago have the Continent’s prospects looked so dark.
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