Building a Better Currency Union

Belly up to the trough 

Like so many policy domains, international economic policy in the West has fallen victim to the Late Twentieth Century Delusion: 'People are people.'

Foreign policy was once the playground of race realists at every level.  The only trace of this left may be the Pentagon, who in its double-secret PC-proofed dungeon whips up instructional pamphlets aimed at keeping GIs from getting killed by letting them know some people are, in fact, Not Like Us.  (Or used to anyway.)

Back when foreign conquest was the norm, the primitive peoples of the world were seen as docile labor to exploit (rightists) or as poor backward heathen to civilize (leftists).  But what no one disagreed on was that they were, in fact, primitive.  That is to say, Not Like Us.

De-colonization, the U.N., etc. at last clued us in to the fact that everybody on planet earth was, in fact, just like us.  International economic policy has thus taken on a rather surreal cast, as on the one hand the West insists that Africa is its equal, but on the other hand sets up trade agreements with her that make her appear, decades after de-colonization, to be a slightly retarded child.

One current example of the perils of 'People are people' is that of the European Monetary Union, or Eurozone.  Conceived in the chaos of the waning days of Bretton Woods, it aimed to be something entirely new--a monetary and economic union of several large sovereign states.  The hard work of Jacques Delors, among others, made it all happen.

(The British, then as now, were not enthusiasts.)


Ten years later, it all seems to be falling apart. (Don't be fooled by the lull in hysterics; disintegration continues apace.) Economists are openly warning that to survive, the Eurozone will have to split in two.  Yet the 2011 EU decision-makers seemed totally baffled by the meltdown. Why?

The reasons are many; we shan't look at all but only one: People aren't people.



The Eurozone, some have surmised, was at its heart an attempt by the French to neuter fearsome Germany once and for all.  The German cities and states had long been wealthy trade centers, but unification in 1871 gelled them into a power that brought Europe to its knees.  Germany was, in a word, scary.  Forcing her to entwine her fiscal fortunes forever with those of Mediterranean Europe... what better way to leash the giant?

So how did it happen?

As Bretton Woods broke down, several European states began to peg their currencies to each other:  The European Monetary System (EMS) was born.  The end goal was a single currency for all of Europe, with liberté, égalité, and fraternité for all.  But there was always a niggling problem.

During this time [1983-87], the Deutsche mark evolved as the anchor currency of the system, and the anti-inflationary policies of the Bundesbank became the reference point for partner countries....

There were perceptions that the system was "asymmetric" because of the dominant role of the Deutsche mark...

In the wake of the Wall Street crash of October 1987, ...international funds sought refuge in the Deutsche mark, and strong tensions developed within the ERM [European Exchange Rate Mechanism]... (1)

What to do when the dream of equality bumps up against the reality of superiority?

While Germany may have chained herself to this shaky ship to atone for her WWII sins, for the weaker southern economies it was basically a free-cash bonanza. (Much like EU accession).

Once they had joined the euro zone, Europe's southern countries gave up trying to sort out their finances, says [ex-Finance Minister] Papantoniou. With a steady flow of easy money coming from the northern European countries, the Greek public sector began borrowing as if there were no tomorrow. This was only possible because the country, in becoming part of the euro zone, was also effectively borrowing Germany's credibility and credit rating.

Then the 2008 world credit crunch hit and the tide went out, revealing who was not wearing a bathing suit.  Unpayable debts, hand-wringing, finger-pointing, late night negotiations, harried Brussels press conferences, riots, tear gas... Time to throw in the towel?

Heretics, Kulaks, and Witches: All That's Old is New Again

Haunted by his own thought crimes, baffled by the zombies spouting dogmatic nonsense all around him, today's American is lost.  He reaches into the mists of history and gropes for a comparison.  What has his country become? What is this?

     Is this like the persecution of the heliocentrists?

     Is it like the witch trials in early modern Europe?

     Is it like the Soviet fight for doctrinal purity?

Happy Easter

 Image source

Happy Easter, to those who can see and to those who cannot.

You may have missed...


Travel:  The adventurers who set out to see the world and its peoples, one of Europe's enduring legacies.  You can see the tribes they encountered through their eyes, often reading their very words, for free on the internet in 2012.  Let yourself be swept away...

The Far East:
The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 1 and Volume 2
Also:
The Journals of Jesuit Matteo Ricci, 1583-1610 (in Chapter V of Hukluytus Posthumus)

South America:
The letters of Amerigo Vespucci, from his voyages in 1499-1504.
Also:
A brief account of Sir Francis Drake's voyage around the world, launched in 1577.

North America:
The Voyages of Samuel Champlain in North America in the early 1600s.
Also:
The expedition of Lewis and Clark, 1804-06.

 The South Pacific:
A Voyage Toward the South Pole and Around the World, by Capt. James Cook, 1775.

Sub-Saharan Africa:
Mungo Park's excellent Travels in the Interior of Africa, 1798.
Also:
Sir Henry M. Stanley's How I Found Livingstone, 1871.

The whole world:
The Exploration of the World, 1882, Jules Verne.  A marvelous anthology of narratives from the world's greatest travelers, from Herodotus to Ibn Batuta to Columbus.  A real treasure trove, not to be missed.


Wishing everyone the simple pleasures of celebrating with family.  'The days are long, but the years are short...'  Happy Easter / Joyeuses Pâques to all.

HBD Day banners

[UPDATED: Added modified versions based on suggestions]

Olave d'Estienne has proposed that the HBD-aware (those who can see) stake out a square on the calendar to promote awareness among those still laboring under the Late Twentieth Century Delusion.  Discussion has been had here and here, and HBD chick has taken the time to create banner ideas here.

Avid fans of Microsoft Paint, we here at Those Who Can See have whipped up some banner ideas as well.  Multiple styles have been tried and taglines have been tossed about willy-nilly.

We begin with the nature-themed:

The Mis-education of Afro-Americans, Yesterday

Image source

Paul Kersey leads with this story--Nutshell: Teachers in failing black school districts routinely change kids' test scores to comply with No Child Left Behind, fraud investigation ensues, hands are thrown in the air, shall anyone ever succeed in closing The Gap?


It may surprise us that one hundred years ago, as today, much ink was spilled over the question of educating American Blacks.  Two generations had passed since Emancipation; what progress had been made on the great project of lifting up this 'race in its childhood'? W.H. Collins, in 1918:

But notwithstanding the fact that the illiteracy of the Negro race had been reduced by 1910 to about thirty-three per cent, there is a widespread feeling of disappointment in Negro education. Not that it has made the Negro more criminal as has sometimes been said, however, this is not yet well determined, but rather that it has failed to make him a greater producer, or to aid him to adjust himself to economic conditions. Instead of firing him with the desire to do more and better work, too often he quits it altogether.   (1)

They [Southern men around 1904]  unite further in the opinion that education such as they [Blacks] receive in the public schools, so far from appearing to uplift them, appears to be without any appreciable beneficial effect upon their morals or their standing as citizens. But more than this; universally, they report a general depravity and retrogression of the Negroes at large in sections in which they are left to themselves, closely resembling a reversion to barbarism.   (2)

Aside from some unqualified successes like the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, Afro education had not yet produced the desired results.  Blacks still had higher rates of illegitimacy, criminality, and disease and lower levels of wealth than white Americans.


A century on, what has changed?  Much ink is still spilled over the question of educating American Blacks.  Two generations have passed since the end of Segregation, and...

...and Blacks still have higher rates of illegitimacy, criminality, and disease and lower levels of wealth than white Americans.  Now, via standardized testing, we also know that they lag far behind in the classroom.

The Guilty Party

Olave d'Estienne has been kind enough to post this leaflet which lays out the plight of Blacks and Hispanics wronged by the tech industry.

Although they are 12.6% of the population, we are told, Blacks make up only 1% of internet company founders and 1.5% of Silicon Valley employees.   The latter, in addition, are subjected to a humiliating yellow badge-wearing regime which bars them from riding company bicycles.

The leaflet also shares with us the troubling facts that (1) Blacks' higher melanin content makes it harder for face-tracking software to sense them and (2) the disproportionately high crime rates in black ghettos tempt U.S. pedestrians to avoid them, with technology.

Who shall pay for these sins?

The detectives at OnlineITDegree.net claim to have sniffed out the culprit:  Its name is 'tech' and its weapon is 'racism':

Strangers at the Gate

What can destroy a great people?  The student of history knows vast civilizations have crumbled into dust.  He is sure, however, that no such fate could possibly await his own.

Rome, 100 A.D.:

While every land…daily pours
Its starving myriads forth. Hither they come
To batten on the genial soil of Rome,
Minions, then lords of every princely dome,
Grammarian, painter, augur, rhetorician,
Rope-dancer, conjurer, fiddler, and physician.

--Juvenal, Satire III

For 'great peoples destroyed,' few have drawn as much puzzlement as the Romans.  Historian Tenney Frank (1916):

When Tacitus informs us that in Nero’s day [54-68 A.D.] a great many of Rome’s senators and knights were descendants of slaves and the native stock had dwindled to surprisingly small proportions, we are not sure whether we are not to take it as an exaggerated thrust by an indignant Roman of the old stock. (1)

Frank pored through 13,900 sepulchral inscriptions from imperial Rome to try to find an answer.  His research

... has at least convinced me that Juvenal and Tacitus were not exaggerating. It is probable that when these men wrote a very small percentage of the free plebeians on the streets of Rome could prove unmixed Italian descent. By far the larger part—perhaps ninety percent—had Oriental blood in their veins. (1)

 

Mass importation of Eastern slaves coupled with ever more lax manumission (slave-freeing) practices, Frank argued, helped lead Rome to (as Thilo Sarrazin would say) 'abolish itself.'

We know for instance that when Italy had been devastated by Hannibal and a large part of its population put to the sword, immense bodies of slaves were bought up in the East to fill the void; and that during the second century, when the plantation system with its slave service was coming into vogue, the natives were pushed out of the small farms and many disappeared to the provinces of the ever-expanding empire.[...] During the first century B.C., the importation of captives and slaves continued, while the free-born citizens were being wasted in the social, Sullan, and civil wars. (1)

Wealthy women opting out of motherhood? Juvenal again:

But hardly ever does a woman in labour lie in the gilded bed; so potent are the arts, so powerful are the drugs, [of] she who makes them infertile.

Frank concurs:

By combining epigraphical and literary references, a fairly full history of the noble families can be procured, and this reveals a startling inability of such families to perpetuate themselves. We know, for instance, in Caesar’s day of forty-five patricians, only one of whom is represented by posterity when Hadrian came to power. The Aemilii, Fabii, Claudii, Manlii, Valerii, and all the rest, with the exception of the Cornelii, have disappeared. Augustus and Claudius raised twenty-five families to the patriciate, and all but six of them disappear before Nerva’s reign. (1)

Tenney Frank may have been right; he may not have. But in the two thousand years since Rome fell, have we seen proof of his 'replacement-by-race-mixture' theory elsewhere?  Far-fetched, or far-sighted?

The Tsar is Far

No sort of philosophy of history, whether Slavophil or Westerniser, has yet solved the enigma, 

why a most unstatelike people has created such an immense and mighty state, 

why so anarchistic a people is so submissive to bureaucracy, 

why a people free in spirit as it were does not desire a free life?  --Nikolai Berdyaev, 1915

The sky is high; the tsar is far.  --Russian proverb

Another election day on planet Earth, another population refusing to act the way Right-Thinking Westerners believe it should.

Two things have mystified the Francis Fukuyamas of the world about non-Western peoples and their way of 'adopting democracy.'  One is these peoples' annoying propensity to produce rulers who stuff urns, crack heads, and throw opponents in prison.  The other is that even when such peoples do manage to squeeze out a 'fair' election, 50+% of them vote for some brutal lunkhead completely unpalatable to Right-Thinking Westerners:

 A monitoring group set up by protesters in Russia has refused to recognise the results of the presidential election which returned Vladimir Putin to power.

The League of Voters said there had been widespread fraud and the poll was an insult to civic society in Russia.

Mr Putin, it added, won 53%, not 63.6% as reported officially. Such a result would have still brought him victory.

Because everyone knows that Democracy (TM) leads a priori to the kind of leaders Right-Thinking Westerners find palatable.  Why just look at Iran in 1979, Algeria in 1991, Nicaragua, Venezuela, or Palestine in 2006, or Ukraine just last year.

Russians, in any case, have long fascinated Western Europeans.  Who is this people, one once asked, held in semi-slavery by their own ethnic brethren?  Who is this people, one asked later, who has abolished free entreprise as well as religion?  Who is this people, one asks today, who continues to happily elect a man famous for clamping down debate and strangling the free press?

Who indeed?

Impossible to know the soul of another people without living it. Outsiders can only observe, listen, hope to catch a glimmer of what they can never truly grasp.