Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Poor, poor, Italy...and The Ridiculous Euro

A few days ago, I read an article by Judy Bachrach in the World Affairs Journal. Here's the URL:


I passed the URL on to others, with my comment, "Poor, poor, Italy...so, the ridiculous Euro has been a fraud from the beginning...why am I not surprised? Time to dump the Euro."

A cousin of mine, who happens to live in Sicily, commented, in return: "I would not trust in a German newspaper ... If Italy fails, the euro dies and even the United States'll have big problems with your dollar...The Italian debt is too large and a failure would drag down the entire western economy."

My cousin makes some good points. At the same time, I am not completely clear on what my cousin thinks a "failure" would look like. So, I replied, as follows:

"I would not trust any newspaper, including American. With a modicum of research and the application of wisdom, however, one can deduce the essence of matters.

What 'fail' means in the instant context is not clear. The euro was a terrible idea that was dead on arrival. It couldn't be anything but a rip-off from Day One. It exists only through the overweening cupidity of political thieves (synonym: politicians) and their cronies and wholesale, forcible application of political correctness on a gullible public.

The U.S. already has big and increasingly serious problems with the dollar. Our idiotic, socialist president is capable only of making the problem worse. Although he says otherwise, his actions are tantamount to modeling the U.S. economy on that of Greece. If he is successful, America will suffer the same way Greece is suffering; the same way any country will suffer from the effects of an overabundance of debt.

That Italy's debt, as America's, is too large, is scandalous. But, the real scandal (if one can penetrate the cloud of political correctness to see it) is that the debts represent, respectively, the amounts of wealth stolen from hard-working, productive Italians (and Sicilians) and Americans, by the political thieves and their cronies. It is the cronies who plot with the politicians to obtain special privileges in return for some type of quid pro quo.

What is the fix? The only answer is to make the debt smaller; reducing it to zero is ideal. But, how? The question is a simple one, but the answer is complex, therefore, problematic.

And, the problem does not lie solely with the political thieves. The political thieves can raise the level of government debt only with the quasi-collusion of their cronies and the 'vulgus mobile.' (Readers who are more familiar with the Greek expression than the Latin expression can substitute 'hoi polloi' for 'vulgus mobile.') I use the prefix 'quasi' here because the vulgus mobile are in a state of ignorance of the fundamental, insidious, highly deleterious economic effects innate to government debt of any kind.

In support of the scandal is that the vulgus mobile are deliberately kept in this state of ignorance by the political thieves, who look only to 'feathering their own nests' at the expense of others. They have convinced themselves that 'what is good for me is good for the country.'

The political thieves can get away with this theft because they are able to convince the 'economically ignorant' that they are being given a 'free lunch.' The 'economically knowledgeable,' of course, know this is a lie; they know there is no such thing as a 'free lunch.'

The bottom line is: regardless of the pronouncements of the political thieves as to whether a debt is 'good debt' or 'bad debt,' the Truth is: there is no debt that is 'good.'

All government debt is super-taxation, i.e., a spending of tax monies before they are expropriated from taxpayers and upon which interest (which must also be expropriated from taxpayers) accrues until the debt is repaid. Thus, as it is with tax monies already expropriated, government spending of debt monies is nothing but a redistribution of wealth from those who produce it to those whose only 'claim to fame' is that they are in good graces with the political thieves.

The Western economies are headed for the tank at ever-increasing speed. Somebody has to apply the brakes. The political thieves will not do it voluntarily."

[By the way, I used the Latin expression "vulgus mobile" (also written as "mobile vulgus" meaning "the fickle crowd") rather than the Greek because "mobile" is the origin of our English word, "mob." No disrespect was intended by its use.]

To the above response, I haven't yet received a reply from my cousin... and I may not receive one...

Perhaps you, the reader, will comment...