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

Bureaucratic Auto-Stimulation

President Obama and the National Public Radio crowd are "surprised" at the increasing unemployment numbers

Morning Edition, July 3, 2009 · The surprising loss of 467,000 jobs in June, far more than expected, is fueling Republican criticism of the Obama administration's stimulus program. After the numbers were announced Thursday, President Obama called the huge job losses sobering. The continuing fallout in the labor market is causing problems in the housing sector, and vice versa.

Are they historically ignorant? This stimulus money has only stimulated more government bureaucracy--it hasn't produced anything. Worse; it is a gross misallocation of capital that the private sector could have used in a productive way that really would have created jobs by now.

How to Stimulate the Economy

* Drill Here, Drill Now, Drill Everywhere
* Commit to clean coal for the next 20 years
* Continue to encourage development of green technology, but stop stupidly shoveling government money at it--it's just not there yet
* Build 50 nuclear power plant
* Build 20 new Navy ships
* Build 100 new Military planes
* Pay private contractors to fix the nation's highways, bridges, and other infrastructure--Don't funnel the money through 14 bureaucracies to do it

You Know What's Going on? Really?

Robert Heinlein once said that every story you read in the paper is invariably true, except for that rare story in which you witnessed the event yourself.

While I was living in Los Angeles an old contracting officer explained to me how the official inflation numbers were thoroughly cooked. This fellow was no lightweight - when the government purchased a GPS satellite, he was the one who signed the check. It started me thinking and doing some research.

It doesn't end there with the CPI. Debt, terrorism, unemployment, the climate... the list goes on and on. I'll present some of the information here, and hopefully it will build some healthy scepticism in your mind about what you hear and see in the press.

The Real CPI

Debt

Unemployment

Terrorism and Suspicious Incidents

Climate

Consider that we have a surrogate foreign workforce in Asia numbering in the millions - who are looking shortly to be unemployed. In the 1930's they would have been included in the unemployment rate since most of our goods were domestically produced.

Time would fail me to discuss the methods by which these figures are massaged, twisted, or pulled out of thin air. The main point here is that most of the "statistics" that are being reported are off by a significant amount. Be sceptical.

- Hugh Farnham

Naked Workers of the World: Clothe Yourselves!

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

-- Mark Twain

Today is May Day. In much of Europe and Latin America, today is Labor Day.

It’s campaign season, so we’re hearing about the masses of people living in inner-city poverty because there are no jobs, or those left jobless because the factory shut down, etc. Those of us who suggest the unemployed move to where the jobs are or go get some training are shouted down either as uncaring or naively simplistic.

Here’s a question: What would your chances of getting hired be if you showed up to the job interview naked? Probably not too good. OK, how about if you presented yourself wearing a 17th Century pilgrim outfit? You know, the big wide-brim hat with a large buckle in the front, poofy-sleeved shirt, wide black belt with a big buckle, leather breeches, square shoes with, well, a buckle. You’d probably be higher on the list than the naked guy, but your chances of landing that job would still be quite slim.

Well, we have a lot of naked people looking for work in this country. And we have people in pilgrim’s costumes, women wearing Victorian era dresses with the thousand buttons down the front, men in tight-fitting 70’s disco garb… Times change, and if you want to stay employed you must change with them. The COBOL programmer has gone the way of the wheelwright and the candlestick maker. Detroit used to be a boomtown, but it ain’t one no more, and thousands have voted with their feet.

If you are a displaced worker and you’re waiting for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John McCain to help you, you’re going to be waiting a long, long time. Politicians win elections by making promises to people like you, but have you noticed that there are always people like you? And they’re still waiting. The ones who have escaped the ranks of the unemployed are the ones who took the initiative to move, update their job skills, or both. It really is that simple. The only thing easier is walking around naked all day.

Helpful Employment Links:

http://www.doleta.gov/layoff/workers.cfm

http://www.educationmoney.com/