Europe is in trouble because it is overdoing the collectivism again. By Alex Berenson.
Update on Europe, The World’s Progressive Dream (TM), the place all those Gen Z ladies say they’ll move when they stop being too sad to get out of bed.
The Spanish government — loved by annoying lefties everywhere — just collapsed.
The French are doing what they do best, rioting.
In Germany, anti-immigration conservatives keep gaining ground.
Of the four countries that dominate continental Europe, only Italy has a stable government — a conservative government run by Georgia Meloni, which has now lasted longer than any other in Italy’s post-World War 2 history and which just banned burqas for students.
This trend is not accident or coincidence.
The heavy hands of the bureaucrats killed (legal) entrepreneurship:
French local and national government spending makes up 57 percent of the country’s domestic product. … Italy and Germany are at 50 percent. (The United States is at 38 percent.) [Australia 37.5%]
That stifling bureaucracy makes starting companies in Europe hard and growing them next to impossible.
The trend is most clearly seen in technology, where Europe is not even an also-ran. After being marginally competitive in early computing and software, it failed to adapt to the rise of Internet and social media companies. American policymakers and companies don’t even pretend to worry about its role in artificial intelligence.
Along with keeping new jobs from being created, Europe has gone out of its way to destroy the ones it already has. For over a decade, European environmentalists have pressed ruinous decarbonization efforts, leading to super-high energy costs and a loss of middle-class factory jobs to China.
France’s government is more controlling than the Soviet Union! By Michael Arouet.
Only one in three French people works in the real economy, two-thirds live, one way or another, off other people’s taxes.
They won’t vote for politicians who say France’s absurd pensions and overblown state spending are unsustainable, they vote for those who promise to lower the already low retirement age even further. …
France is cooked. There will be no serious reforms. … France is heading into a debt crisis that will hit the entire eurozone. … The situation is so bad that no nice options remain.
Europe is being killed in manufacturing too. By Michael Arouet.
Germans are not only more expensive than the Chinese, but also less productive and more often on sick leave.
Germans must become less complacent, and start working hard again, or the trend will accelerate and wipe out the German industrial base. Unfortunately, German left politicians and unions are mentally stuck in a world that no longer exists. They seriously demanded a four-day workweek without a pay cut for automotive workers. They will achieve a zero-day workweek instead.
Collectivists cannot stand competition, don’t acknowledge the unfairness of not rewarding people who work harder or better (“from each according to his ability, too each according to his need”), and always end up here:
At which point competition from less collectivist societies overwhelms them economically or militarily, and the overly socialist regime collapses.