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

The Road to Hell...

I was reading the Christian Science Monitor’s reportage on the Bush Administration’s legal follies, and it reminded me of a New Testament parable (Luke 28-31) about counting the cost before beginning an enterprise:

For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, `This man began to build, and was not able to finish.' Or what king, going to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and take counsel whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That’s what papa Silverfiddle taught me. President George Bush is a good man with good intentions, but good intentions are not enough when you are the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. You also must have a brilliant staff that understands the constitution and knows how to think things through and plot long-range strategy. You need advisers who can count the cost.

The latest Supreme Court decision granting habeas corpus rights to the scraggly bearded rabble we have locked up at Guantanamo leaves us less safe. It is also a logical response to a seat-of-the-pants legal hodgepodge cobbled together by amateurs that are not even qualified to sell ice cream in front of the White House, let alone advise the president.

This decision is a direct consequence of the Bush administration not knowing what the hell it is doing. They have been making stuff up as they go along. There was no legal strategy, no coherent long-term plan to fit the president’s vision. And that’s a shame, because it was a righteous vision. Some serious thought up front followed by solid legislation could have avoided all this. The tragic lesson here is that vision without strategy is just a dream; and this one has turned into a nightmare.

Sometimes, doing something badly is worse than doing nothing at all. Botching something this thoroughly discredits an entire ideal, which is a shame. This administration’s incoherent bumbling and utter failure to articulate anything higher than “Freedom good, Terror bad,” has contributed to its troubles while dooming the noble project of spreading freedom, fighting tyranny, and killing jihadis.

President Bush has kept us safe, and for that he should enjoy our eternal gratitude. But, you’ll have to excuse those who, standing at the airport in their bare feet, being herded like cattle, contemplate their constitutional freedoms and wistfully count the cost.