Monthly Archives: May 2018

Europe’s Italian Crisis

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Europe is a-roil over Italy’s inability to form a government at any time since the nation’s elections some months ago.  And so is the old guard in Italy.

Italy’s woes rippled across the eurozone, driven by investor worries that an exit by the bloc’s third-largest economy could force others out.

Bank of Italy Governor Ignazio Visco said this with a straight face:

We must never forget that we are only ever a few short steps away from the very serious risk of losing the irreplaceable asset of trust[.]

They’re risking losing that trust, anyway, on the political front—from which flows all economic trust.  The Italian Old Guard is in the way here.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella blocked the formation of a euroskeptic coalition government formed of the antiestablishment 5 Star Movement and the League parties, raising the prospect of new elections.

He perpetrated the decidedly anti-democratic move of refusing to allow a coalition of the two parties who won the election to form a government because he personally didn’t like their finance minister nominee.  I would have thought Italy would have had done with fascism.  And so, sub rosa, would many in Europe, it seems.

And there’s this, based in no small part on those erstwhile coalition parties’ shared lack of enthusiasm for eurozone membership:

Italy hurtled toward a political crisis that is reigniting debate over Europe’s future, including whether the eurozone’s third-largest economy should remain in the currency union.

They’re worried that an Italian exit—if it actually were to happen—would spell the end of the currency union altogether.

Which brings me back to that matter of trust.  Having blocked the formation of a government, Matarella has virtually guaranteed new elections soon—there are no other possible combinations of Italian parties capable of forming a governing coalition.  And those new elections, given who won the last round, will surely be less an election of a new government and more a national referendum on whether Italy should remain in the eurozone.

Of course, Italy should not; they’re a terrible match for that currency union.  Italy, along with Portugal, Greece, and Spain—the original PIGS—should form their own currency union.  Those four nations’ philosophies concerning the purpose of money and of government’s role in society are much closer to each other’s than they are to the rest of Europe’s.

Australian Trade with the PRC

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Australia is finding much of its exports to the People’s Republic of China piling up in PRC ports (Australian wine is the proximate subject of the WSJ piece at the link)—not because the customers no longer want them but because the PRC government objects to Australian policies designed to limit PRC meddling in Australian domestic affairs.

From that, there’s this remark by Rob Taylor, the piece’s author:

Australia faces an awkward diplomatic balancing act in trying to address concerns about political interference while relying heavily on China for its economic well-being.

Stop being dependent on the PRC for trade. It’s as dangerous to be dependent on a single trading partner as it is for a business, or a nation, to be dependent on a single product.

There are lots of other markets around the world—and throughout Asia—for Australian goods and services. It’ll be expensive for Australia to wean itself off the PRC, but the payoff will be well worth it.

Other nations doing business with the PRC should consider the same weaning. After all, what’s the value of a large potential customer base when its government uses that connection for an economic Anschluss?

Out of Touch?

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President Donald Trump signed three Executive Orders impacting public service unions.  One of interest to me is this one.

The third restricts how much on-the-job time federal employees can spend on labor-union duties.

Naturally, the unions management teams are in an uproar over the requirement to have their members spend their work time…working.

Time an employee spends on union activities is time not spent on the work for which the employee was hired.  Union activity work is an additional duty requested by the union; it needs to be done entirely on the employee’s own time.  This restriction is a good start, but the union task time needs to be eliminated altogether from the employee’s work time.  The Federal government—all employers, come to that—hire individual workers, they don’t hire unions.  Unions aren’t temp agencies that provide workers.

Aside from that, this is just a variation on featherbedding.  Time committed to union activities during an eight-hour work day often runs to three hours.  If the work needed can be done in five hours, rather than eight, by the current subset of employees who are committed to union tasks as well as employer work, this suggests that the work required, if done exclusively, can be done with as much as 37% fewer such (union) employees.

Is public service union management out of touch?  No, just privileged.

Free Speech

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…British style.  There is a trial in progress in Leeds (northern England, a bit up the road northeast of Manchester) concerning a

Muslim gang on trial for raping and grooming hundreds of victims, some as young as eleven.

Tommy Robinson, a British activist-journalist, was arrested and hauled off to prison for the heinous crime of reporting information about the defendants—public information, mind you.

British media are forbidden from reporting on certain trials….

The rationalization is that reporting might taint the jury.  Because some juries are more easily tainted than other juries on other trials.  Cue Bill the Cat.

No, it’s a matter of the British government, in the land that gave the world the Magna Carta and John Locke—and jury trials—not trusting its own citizens with the truth.  It’s also a matter of political correctness run amok.  Telling the truth might hurt the feelings of the defendants.

This is the culture the Progressive-Democrats and the Left generally want us to have.

 

h/t Ralph for this one.

The Libya Model and the NLMSM

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Much has been made of National Security Advisor John Bolton’s remark that the “Libya Model” would make a good example for handling northern Korea’s nuclear weapons and its nuclear weapons development program.  That todo is centered on what the NLMSM is pleased to describe as the “Libya Model.”  Deutsche Welle‘s characterization is typical:

…North Korea could end up like Libya, which found itself in a civil war and its leader killed after giving up its nuclear weapons.

That’s not the Libya Model; it’s a deliberate conflation of two separate events.  The Libya Model is this.  Libya under Muammar Gaddafi had been subject to economic and political sanction as a result of its complicity in a number of terrorist acts for some years.  The US’ burning Saddam Hussein’s evil government in early 2003 was the final straw: in late 2003, Gaddafi agreed to give up his nuclear weapons program, and international facilities shortly after the agreement dismantled and removed all traces of it.  Libya lived peacefully with its neighbors in the ensuing years, and the incidence of its participation in terrorist activities fell off sharply, even if Gaddafi did continue to sorely abuse his own people.

Fully eight years later, an entirely separate event occurred.  As part of the Arab Spring of 2011, the Libyan people revolted against Gaddafi’s thuggish rule, and with the active support of European air power and American refueling aircraft and ordnance resupply (the European nations quickly ran out of bombs—literally—and had to be resupplied by us; those same nations also had no air refueling tankers of their own; two examples of a level of preparation that might sound familiar today), they succeeded in overthrowing the Gaddafi regime.

These cynical misrepresentations by the NLMSM do not help in dealing with rogue gangs like northern Korea’s rulers.