European Unemployment: A Modest Proposal

Dispatch from Malaisistan: Is war the answer?

Foreign Policy has a good piece on rampant unemployment among Europe's young college graduates. The author calls them The New Lost Generation.

This year's graduating class is running smack into the worst employment market in decades -- a situation that threatens long-term social and economic trauma.

Although unemployment is high and rising across all demographic groups, Europe's young workers have been especially hard hit.

The economic consequences are obvious: Young adults living at home, afraid to start a family and unable to engage in the warp and woof of their nation. There are also social consequences:

The effects aren't simply financial. One prominent British think-tanker recently warned, "If this situation persists, the risk may be of a new generation lacking the experience, qualifications, and self-belief to provide for themselves and their families."

The old Lost Generation consisted of those worn out by the collapse of idealism that WWI represented. The senseless slaughter left its mark on Hemingway and his contemporaries.

Nowadays, European youth are cut to the quick by the senseless senselessness of believing in nothing while criticizing everything. Eastern European newcomers doing the jobs Western Europeans just won't do while Muslims nibble away at the fabric of their once liberal societies. God has returned to the continent, but he's angry, vengeful and straight out of the 7th Century. America remains a hyperpower...

Perhaps European unemployment is a natural consequence of too much taxation, regulation, immigration? But nobody wants to go there.

So What's The Solution?
Glorious Militarism! War is the answer. Enlist those young folks, build up armies and navies and go conquer the benighted lands that are causing the world so much trouble. Yes, another crusade! Only this time, not for the Pope and Christianity, but rather for classical liberalism.

We need a new crusade, a reconquista of Classical Liberal values, and these aimless Europeans raised on Sartre's absurdities are just the ones to do it!

A new crusade: For beer, women drivers, Pork bratwurst, bikinis and agnosticism. Sink those pirates ships! Those that don't die in the fusillade can swim to shore if the sharks don't get them!

Take up the white man's burden! For hashish cafes, prostitution, blasphemy, strip bars and the sneering morality of no morals! Blast those illiberal terrorist hideouts!

I've often said you can't kill 'em all. But history has shown that you can kill enough of them to where they're no longer a problem. And you can grab some glory and maybe rescue your civilization in the process.

Or you could just cling to the fag end of a clapped out culture and hitch your self esteem to a football club...

Foreign Policy-Europe's New Lost Generation