Southern Europe's notoriously lax work ethic is likely the primary driver between the imbalances in the Eurozone (or Northern Europe's famously hardworking folks might have to tone it down a bit) (funny, the American Left always points to Europe's social welfare state with joy and envy... I wonder if they ever did the General Population/Worker calculation... Europe blows the U.S. away - they do not have a permanent and entrenched underclass consuming production (nor our military budget), and hence they would have been able to stretch out the time between here and their fiscal mushroom cloud a bit more than the U.S. - had it not been for the PIGS).
"Instead of punishing the Greeks for their free-rider and fraudulent gaming of the Maastricht rules -- either by ejecting Greece from the Union to propel them to reform and come back at a competitive exchange rate or by forcing them to restructure their debt within the confines of monetary union, either of which would have eventually strengthened and solidified the euro -- the European leaders have decided to reward the prodigal Greeks with a bailout, socializing their ills and taxing once again the prodigious Northern European workers," - Louis Moore Bacon
The U.S. public employee unions are doing the same thing to the U.S.
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If you have been reading here for a while, and you read the comments, you might have read some of the commentary made by "Pioneerpreppy"; also, you will have noticed that I LOVE to quote a guy by the name of Gene Logsdon - a guy I have never met, and probably share little in common with politically, but whose obvious intellect and, more importantly I would call Logsdon a "KEEN observer of the Human Condition" (THAT is my HIGHEST (intellectual) COMPLIMENT, and what I strive to be myself each and every day) is so overwhelming at times... anyway, here are some recent comments from these two gentlemen:
What we are really looking at is sectionalism and it hasn't really worked itself out yet. The flyover country is pissed about being ruled by the progressive coasts but yet they cannot bring themselves to admit it because of the last major sectional crisis. The problem is further complicated by progressive strong holds in the form of major cities within flyover country itself.It is also why the various sides will never see eye to eye as someone from Manhattan can not even dream what life is like for say a small farm owner in rural Missouri, and vice versa. Yet they (the Manhattanites) wish to put in place laws that maybe logical for them without even a care for how they really effect those others who are worlds away in actuality. - Pioneerpreppy
First of all, if you let big food business rule the roost in agriculture, you are going to get just what you pay taxes for: more big food business. For example, most people don’t even know that they are eating potatoes that have been genetically modified to kill potato bugs. If sometimes you get a notion that potatoes don’t taste as good as they used to, you just might be right. The potato bugs would surely agree with you.But there’s something else that I think is important in this regard. The fact that our country has become divided into so-called red and blue states is an outcome directly traceable to the urban-rural division of our society. This is something of a simplification, but food producers and their social allies tend to vote red and food consumers and their social allies tend to vote blue. The division is thought to be between conservative and liberal philosophies, but it much more reflects the difference between rural and urban values. (There are plenty of urban conservatives and rural liberals.) This division is hopefully coming to an end but has a long way to go yet. We are doing a fairly good job of bringing the city to the countryside but a very poor job of bringing the country to the city-side. Both sides need each others’ viewpoints for good government and social interaction. A good way that we can heal the friction is to bring farming to the city. There is nothing that will cure an overly zealous wildlife lover quicker than to make a farmer or gardener out of her. On the other hand, there is nothing that will change the overly-isolationist view of life cherished by rural people quicker than bringing them into close contact with city life. The rural dweller may think that all those rules that cities make are silly — until he is surrounded by suburbs. - Gene Logsdon
Notice anything?
More soon