1. Before Barrack Obama’s next televised speech, prepare your “ObamaBingo” card by drawing a square. I find that 5″ x 5″ is a good size — and dividing it into columns –five across and five down. That will give you 25 1-inch blocks.
Read the instructions at www.bullshitbingo.net/cards/obama/
Five Threats to the Common Currency
First it was Greece. Then came Portugal and Spain, with Ireland and Italy not far behind. The financial crisis has driven up public debt in Europe’s common currency zone to such heights that many economists fear the euro could collapse. SPIEGEL ONLINE takes a look at the five greatest risks to the future of the euro zone.
American citizens have grown increasingly unhappy with our congressional representatives, and polls show they’re getting disenchanted with the Obama administration in larger numbers. Funny, but before the loss of one Democratic Senate seat with Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, voter’s voices weren’t much heard. Or rather…..not many members of Congress were listening. They are now. Read more…
- At Jesse’s:
Were Lloyd and Jamie and the pigmen of Wall Street and Washington taking notes during Tiger Woods’ apology?
Doubtful.
No one is perfect, of course. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone sins. We are all weak, and insufficient in ourselves. And yet we attempt great things, in fear and trembling. The spirit endures and abides.
But there are moments in history that are epidemic with excess, a pathological pursuit of lust, greed, and deceit with a nihilistic determination that is more like a fashion of the age than an aberration. Chic to be above conventional morality and the law, lacking all proportion. Accepted, and even admired.
Tiger himself is what they call ‘small potatoes,’ the personal foibles of a star athlete. What is more significant is the festival of fraud going on in the financial world, centered around Chicago and New York.
Tiger’s words could be the new American Anthem for a generation of reckless, selfish, and self-destructive behaviour by those most blessed by its freedom, offered the greatest opportunities and privileges, sometimes undeserved, and most often paid for by the sacrifice of others.
Most of them still have no regrets, except of course for the fear of discovery. They will have to somehow grow a conscience for that. Or face the withdrawal of support by their sponsors. In the case of Tiger it was Nike. In the case of the Banks it is the US government. And in the case of the US government it is a gullible and complacent public.
“Many of you in this room know me. Many of you have cheered for me, have worked with me, always supported me. Now, every one of you has good reason to be critical of me. I want to say to each on of you simply and directly I am deeply sorry for my irresponsible and selfish behaviour I engaged in. I know people want to find out how i could be so selfish and foolish.
I knew my actions were wrong but I convinced myself that the normal rules didn’t apply. I never thought about who I was hurting. Instead, I only thought about myself…
I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt that I was entitled.
Parents used to point to me as a role model for their kids. I owe all those families a special apology. I want to say to them that I am truly sorry.
I recognize I have brought this on myself and I know, above all, I am the one who needs to change.
I was wrong. I was foolish. I don’t get to play by different rules.”
“How Could I Be So Selfish and So Foolish”
In the present system, the more unrestricted the banks are, the more money they can generate “out of thin air,” and the more damage they can inflict upon the wealth-generation process. FULL ARTICLE by Frank Shostak
The Economics of Calvin and Calvinism
by Murray N. Rothbard on February 18, 2010
[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. An audio version of this Mises Daily, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available as a free download.]
John Calvin’s social and economic views closely parallel Luther’s, and there is no point in repeating them here. There are only two main areas of difference: their views on usury, and on the concept of the “calling,” although the latter difference is more marked for the later Calvinist Puritans of the 17th century.
Calvin’s main contribution to the usury question was in having the courage to dump the prohibition altogether.
This son of an important town official had only contempt for the Aristotelian argument that money is sterile. A child, he pointed out, knows that money is only sterile when locked away somewhere; but who in their right mind borrows to keep money idle? Merchants borrow in order to make profits on their purchases, and hence money is then fruitful.
As for the Bible, Luke’s famous injunction only orders generosity towards the poor, while Hebraic law in the Old Testament is not binding in modern society. To Calvin, then, usury is perfectly licit, provided that it is not charged in loans to the poor, who would be hurt by such payment. Also, any legal maximum of course must be obeyed. And finally, Calvin maintained that no one should function as a professional moneylender.
The odd result was that hedging his explicit pro-usury doctrine with qualification, Calvin in practice converged on the views of such Scholastics as Biel, Summenhart, Cajetan, and Eck. Calvin began with a sweeping theoretical defense of interest taking and then hedged it about with qualifications; the liberal Scholastics began with a prohibition of usury and then qualified it away. But while in practice the two groups converged and the Scholastics, in discovering and elaborating upon exceptions to the usury ban, were theoretically more sophisticated and fruitful, Calvin’s bold break with the formal ban was a liberating breakthrough in Western thought and practice. It also threw the responsibility for applying teachings on usury from the Church or state to the individual’s conscience. As Tawney puts it, “The significant feature in his [Calvin's] discussion of the subject is that he assumes credit to be a normal and inevitable incident in the life of a society.”[1]
A more subtle difference, but in the long run perhaps having more influence on the development of economic thought, was the Calvinist concept of the “calling.” This new concept was embryonic in Calvin and was developed further by later Calvinists, and especially Puritans, in the late 17th century. Older economic historians, such as Max Weber, made far too much of the Calvinist as against Lutheran and Catholic conceptions of the “calling.” All these religious groups emphasized the merit of being productive in one’s labor or occupation, one’s “calling” in life. But there is, especially in the later Puritans, the idea of success in one’s calling as a visible sign of being a member of the elect. The success is striven for, of course, not to prove that one is a member of the elect destined to be saved but, assuming that one is in the elect by virtue of one’s Calvinist faith, to strive to labor and succeed for the glory of God. A Calvinist emphasis on postponement of earthly gratification led to a particular stress on saving. Labor or “industry” and thrift, almost for their own sake, or rather for God’s sake, were emphasized in Calvinism much more than in the other segments of Christianity.[2]
The focus, then, both in Catholic countries and in Scholastic thought, became very different from that of Calvinism. The Scholastic focus was on consumption, the consumer, as the goal of labor and production. Labor was not so much a good in itself as a means toward consumption on the market. The Aristotelian balance, or golden mean, was considered a requisite of the good life, a life leading to happiness in keeping with the nature of man. And that balanced life emphasized the joys of consumption, as well as of leisure, in addition to the importance of productive effort.
In contrast, a rather grim emphasis on work and on saving began to be stressed in Calvinist culture. This de-emphasis on leisure of course fitted with the iconoclasm that reached its height in Calvinism — the condemnation of the enjoyment of the senses as a means of expressing religious devotion. One of the expressions of this conflict came over religious holidays, which Catholic countries enjoyed in abundance. To the Puritans, this was idolatry; even Christmas was not supposed to be an occasion for sensate enjoyment.
There has been considerable dispute over the “Weber thesis,” propounded by the early-20th-century German economic historian and sociologist, Max Weber, which attributed the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution to the late Calvinist concept of the calling and the resulting “capitalist spirit.” For all its fruitful insights, the Weber thesis must be rejected on many levels. First, modern capitalism, in any meaningful sense, begins not with the Industrial Revolution of 18th and 19th centuries but, as we have seen, in the Middle Ages and particularly in the Italian city-states. Such examples of capitalist rationality as double-entry bookkeeping and various financial techniques begin in these Italian city-states as well. All were Catholic.
Indeed, it is in a Florentine account book of 1253 that there is first found the classic procapitalist formula: “In the name of God and of profit.”
No city was more of a financial and commercial center than Antwerp in the 16th century, a Catholic center. No man shone as much as financier and banker as Jacob Fugger, a good Catholic from southern Germany. Not only that: Fugger worked all his life, refused to retire, and announced that “he would make money as long as he could.” A prime example of the Weberian “Protestant ethic” from a solid Catholic! And we have seen how the Scholastic theologians moved to understand and accommodate the market and market forces.
On the other hand, while it is true that Calvinist areas in England, France, Holland, and the North American colonies prospered, the solidly Calvinist Scotland remained a backward and undeveloped area, even to this day.[3]
But even if the focus on calling and labor did not bring about the Industrial Revolution, it might well have led to another outstanding difference between Calvinist and Catholic countries — a crucial difference in the development of economic thought. Professor Emil Kauder’s brilliant speculation to this effect will inform the remainder of this work. Thus Kauder:
Calvin and his disciples placed work at the center of their social theology … All work in this society is invested with divine approval. Any social philosopher or economist exposed to Calvinism will be tempted to give labor an exalted position in his social or economic treatise, and no better way of extolling labor can be found than by combining work with value theory, traditionally the very basis of an economic system. Thus value becomes labor value, which is not merely a scientific device for measuring exchange rates but also the spiritual tie combining Divine Will with economic everyday life.[4]
In their extolling of work, the Calvinists concentrated on systematic, continuing industriousness, on a settled course of labor. Thus the English Puritan divine Samuel Hieron opined that “He that hath no honest business about which ordinarily to be employed, no settled course to which he may betake himself, cannot please God.”
Particularly influential was the early-17th-century Cambridge University academic, the Rev. William Perkins, who did much to translate Calvinist theology into English practice. Perkins denounced four groups of men who had “no particular calling to walk in”: beggars and vagabonds; monks and friars; gentlemen who “spend their days in eating and drinking”; and servants, who allegedly spent their time waiting. All these were dangerous because unsettled and undisciplined. Particularly dangerous were wanderers, who “avoided the authority of all.” Furthermore, believed Perkins, the “lazy multitude was always inclined … to popish opinions, always more ready to play than to work; its members would not find their way to heaven.”[5]
In contrast to the Calvinist glorification of labor, the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition was quite different:
Instead of work, moderate pleasure-seeking and happiness form the center of economic actions, according to Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy. A certain balanced hedonism is an integrated part of the Aristotelian theory of the good life. If pleasure in a moderate form is the purpose of economics, then following the Aristotelian concept of the final cause, all principles of economics including valuation must be derived from this goal. In this pattern of Aristotelian and Thomistic thinking, valuation has the function of showing how much pleasure can be derived from economic goods.[6]
Hence, Great Britain, heavily influenced by Calvinist thought and culture, and its glorification of the mere exertion of labor, came to develop a labor theory of value, while France and Italy, still influenced by Aristotelian and Thomist concepts, continued the Scholastic emphasis on the consumer and his subjective valuation as the source of economic value. While there is no way to prove this hypothesis conclusively, the Kauder insight has great value in explaining the comparative development of economic thought in Britain and in the Catholic countries of Europe after the 16th century.
Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School. He was an economist, economic historian, and libertarian political philosopher. See Murray N. Rothbard’s article archives.
This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. An audio version of this Mises Daily, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available as a free download.
.
[1] Richard H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1927, New York: New American Library, 1954), p. 95.
[2] In contrast to the Catholics, to Luther, and probably to Calvin (who, however, was ambivalent on the subject), the Puritans were “postmillennialist,” i.e., they believed that human beings would have to establish the Kingdom of God on earth for a thousand years before Christ would return. The others were either “premillennialist” (Christ would return to earth and then set up a thousand years of the Kingdom of God on earth), or, like the Catholics, amillennialist (Christ would return period, and then the world would end). Postmillennialism, of course, tended to induce in its believers eagerness and even haste to get on with their own establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth so that Jesus could eventually return.
[3] The fact that only late Calvinism developed this version of the calling indicates that Weber might have had his causal theory reversed: that the growth of capitalism might have led to a more accommodating Calvinism rather than the other way round. Weber’s approach holds up better in analyzing those societies, such as China, where religious attitudes seem to have crippled capitalist economic development. Thus, see the analysis of religion and economic development in China and Japan by the Weberian Norman Jacobs, The Origin of Modern Capitalism and Eastern Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1958).
[4] Emil Kauder, A History of Marginal Utility Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 5.
[5] Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 216; see also pp. 206–26.
[6] Kauder, op. cit., note 7, p. 9.
Simon & Schuster, 272 pp., $25
Among the more trenchant touches in John Lanchester’s study of the financial bust is his framing of the new finance as Wall Street’s answer to post-modernism. Wall Street, too, in Lanchester’s account, engineered “a break with common sense, a turn toward self-referentiality and abstraction, and notions that couldn’t be explained in workaday English.” If post-modern art has often seemed like an arcane conversation among the cognoscenti that was meant more to confuse the onlooker than to satisfy or inform, one could barely say less of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and the welter of alphabet securities that underlay the new finance. The parallel should not be pushed too far, but Lanchester is right that the financial crisis sprang from the esoteric principles and practices of an insulated elite.
Wall Street has been so smitten with itself that it lost sight of the purpose—to provide credit and capital to the rest of us, remember?—that society entrusted to it. Lanchester, a British novelist and a banker’s son, excels at recalling, in comprehensible terms, this original—and betrayed—purpose. If his penchant for metaphor occasionally leads him off the rails, more often he spots latent truths that conventional banking reporters miss. Thus he nicely observes that ATMs, with their creation of “frictionless” and seemingly ownerless money, can induce a frightening vertigo; and that Alan Greenspan was so robotic in his defense of new financial instruments that he sounded like “a computer program written to impersonate [what] Alan Greenspan would have said: Free market good. Trust free market.”
Though he is essentially a tourist to his subject, Lanchester understands perfectly that the man behind the curtain was no wizard—that markets, far from being God-given instruments of perfection, were human constructs. He understands, too, that the precision embedded in financial models was a false precision, and that the idea that risk could be “boiled down to a [single] number” fatally endowed practitioners with an undeserved confidence. And the central error of the era, Lanchester suggests, was cultural. Quoting Senator Byron Dorgan, whose prescient warning went unheeded, “The culture is that Wall Street knows best.” The corollary was that the market was “magically self-regulating,” and thus not in need of government regulation or adult supervision.
Lanchester sees the flaws of bankers in cultural terms as well. They and the other troubadours for the new finance errantly believed that ordinary people thought like experts did—or as they imagined experts did: arithmetically and flawlessly. But since most people are neither experts nor computers, millions of them mortgaged their homes for more than they could afford. He frames the greed of bankers by correctly pointing out that no sooner is a regulation crafted than bankers set to figuring ways around it. This observation is hardly new, but Lanchester delivers it with added force by contrasting financiers with health care workers: “Doctors don’t, for the most part, pride themselves on saying ‘What the hell, nobody’s looking, so I’m just going to reuse this dirty needle.’”
As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, truth is ridiculed, then denied, and then “accepted as having been obvious to everyone from the beginning.” So let’s start with the obvious: There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan. None. The U.S. president and his advisors labored for three months and brought forth old wine in bigger bottles. The speech contained not one single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing. Instead, the administration deliberated for 94 days to deliver essentially “more men, more money, try harder.” It sounded ominously similar to Mikhail Gorbachev’s “bloody wound” speech that led to a similar-sized, temporary Soviet troop surge in Afghanistan in 1986.
Obama’s Indecent Interval Thomas Johnson, Foreign Policy (hat tip Naked Capitalism)
At Jesse’s Cafe:
Regular readers will be aware of our thesis that the American Wall Street banks have become dominated by a culture of compulsive sociopaths who are incapable of reforming or restraining their greed. Like all addicts, they push the envelope, emboldened by each successful scam, the weakness of regulators, and the craven support of politicians, going further and further until at long last they go one step too far, with spectacularly destructive results.
Goldman Sachs may have reached that point. And as also suggested here, the rebuke may be coming from foreign nations who become weary of the extra-legal antics of the rogue American banks.
In the interests of harmony, the Europeans may once again bow to US pressure and continue to permit the Money Center privateers to roam through the interational financial system wreaking havoc, as they have been doing through the domestic US economy. It will be too bad if they do.
If it ever comes to the light of day, the complicity of a few central banks and governments in the actions of one or two of the money center banks in manipulating several global markets may ignite a firestorm of a political scandal.
At the very least, it remains a practical imperative that the banks be restrained, the financial system reformed, and the economy brought back into balance, before there can be any sustainable recovery and stability.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2010/02/simon-johnson-goldman-faces-special.html
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Like most Volkswagens this car is ugly but it works. I hope!
Volkswagen’s $600 car gets 258 mpg — It looks like Ford, Chrysler and GM
missed the boat again!
China launches $600 car that will get 258 mpg
This $600 car is no toy and is ready to be released in China next year.
The single seater aero car totes VW (Volkswagen) branding.
Volkswagen did a lot of very highly protected testing of this car in
Germany, but it was not announced until now where the car would make it’s
first appearance.
The car was introduced at the VW stockholders meeting as the most economical
car in the world is presented.
The initial objective of the prototype was to prove that 1 liter of fuel
could deliver 100 kilos of travel.
Spartan interior doesn’t sacrifice safety
The aero design proved essential to getting the desired result. The body is
3.47 meters long and just 1.25 meters wide, and a little over a meter high.
The prototype was made completely of carbon fiber and is not painted to save
weight.
The power plant is a one cylinder diesel positioned ahead of the rear axle
and combined with an automatic shift controlled by a knob in the interior.
Safety was not compromised as the impact and roll-over protection is
comparable to the GT racing cars.
$600 car gets 258 mpg
The Most Economic Car in the World will be on sale next year:
Better than Electric Car � 258 miles/gallon: IPO 2010 in Shanghai
This is a single seated car
From conception to production: 3 years and the company is headquartered in
Hamburg , Germany ..
Will be selling for 4000 yuan, equivalent to US$600..
Gas tank capacity = 1.7 gallons
Speed = 62 � 74.6 Miles/hour
Fuel efficiency = 258 miles/gallon
Travel distance with a full tank = 404 miles
Volkswagen 258 mpg car on sale in 2010
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has been held in awe for many years for his business acumen. But since the world’s richest man embarked upon a career change as a global philanthropist his self-importance has blossomed.
On the occasion of the latest global mega gabfest known as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr Gates granted interviews to two German newspapers to vaunt his foundation’s work, and then to criticize and shame the Prime Minister of another European country – Italy – for not conforming to Gates’ definition of generosity. Such effrontery is almost unheard of. Is Bill Gates so involved in his own version of the finest in philanthropy that he never had time to learn diplomacy, manners or humility?
Mr Berlusconi, who has provided fodder for the prurient international press with his peccadilloes (which occurred on his Sardinian property and not in the government seat of power as with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office), has become the whipping boy of Bill Gates: his is the sole name on Gates’ “List of Shame.” What for? For allegedly reducing foreign aid as part of the Italian government’s budgetary measures to attempt to reduce a government deficit of 5.3 percent of GDP and an official debt of 115 percent of GDP.
Mr Gates chastised Mr Berlusconi because Italy’s foreign aid was 0.21 percent of its GDP in 2008 compared with top-of-the-heap Sweden with a ratio of 0.99 percent. However, Mr Gates gave a pass to the United States which was dead last on the list of 30 OECD countries with 0.19 percent because President Obama “proposed to double giving.”
Bill Gates is a firm believer that official aid is a force for good, ignoring many experts’ claim that foreign aid is significantly wasted and promotes corruption in the poorest of poor countries. Perhaps the decision by the Italian government actually makes more sense.
Regarding the newspaper interviews, the New York Post picked up the two messages and reported that “In a rare public jab” the Microsoft founder “ripped Berlusconi’s ‘stinginess’ with foreign aid and put him at the top of his ‘list of shame.’” Gates went on to further personalize his attack by stating to the Frankfurter Rundschau “Dear Silvio, I am sorry to make things difficult for you, but you are ignoring the poor people of the world.” Gates gave another interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung on the same theme, embellishing his remarks with additional shamelessness: “Rich people spend a lot more money on their own problems – like baldness – than they do to fight malaria” – an apparent reference to Mr Berlusconi’s meticulous attention to personal appearance.
Does being the richest man in the world entitle Bill Gates to humiliate heads of government, duly elected in a democracy?
The verbal assault on Mr Berlusconi was truly inopportune, coming only a few weeks after he was physically attacked by a deranged, hate-filled leftist at a political rally in Milan. While still in the hospital, Mr Berlusconi sent a message expressing gratitude to Pope Benedict XVI and others for their get well wishes, publicly forgave his attacker and stated that “love always triumphs over envy and hatred.” Bill Gates should take note.
In castigating the Prime Minister, Bill Gates cast his aspersion on all of Italy too. But Italians need no lessons in generosity from Bill Gates. One example will illustrate the point. Thousands of Italians have dedicated their lives to alleviating poverty as missionaries who “live where they work” in distant lands helping the poor 24/7 without media attention. Their contribution goes beyond money and is nurtured by Caritas.
Too often Italians at all levels find themselves being humiliated by the “holier than thou” crowd. But there has to be some sense of awe at the contributions of Italians over the centuries. Even on the part of Bill Gates….
In the mid 1990s, Mr Gates made an historical purchase: Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester – the only manuscript of the renowned Italian genius in the United States.
The Italian government museum authorities had bid for the same document, wanting repatriation as a matter of recognition and pride of ownership, but their budget could not match the bottomless money pit of a determined Bill Gates who reportedly paid $31 million. Should Gates look at the complexity of the Codex from time to time, it should give him food for thought: this is only one of the countless works of genius produced by Italians, something he could only buy with money – but never create!
Besides missionaries, who is helping the poor? Surely the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides plenty of assistance through grants. Bill Gates can show lots of personal pictures, balance sheets and even an “Annual Letter” to toot his own horn and chastise those who do not do as he does. His recently released 2010 letter explains how the Gateses have given away millions of dollars for worthy causes especially for disease control and prevention such as malaria.
But the Gates Foundation also provides plenty of financial assistance so that certain nonprofit organizations have all the abortifacients they need, especially in Africa. William H. Gates Sr., Bill’s father, who also is part of the Foundation, was once head of Planned Parenthood. Bill Gates is in bed with the culture of death. He fully embraces the “fewer people, better environment” ideology.
Mr Gates’ 2010 letter includes this line: “… not spending on health is a bad deal for the environment because improvements in health, including voluntary family planning, lead people to have smaller families, which in turn reduces the strain on the environment.”
This is the arrogance of his kind of philanthropy – a direct contradiction of the word’s true meaning!
On its web site, the Gates Foundation shows a set of 15 “Guiding Principles.” Number 12 on the list states: “We demand ethical behavior of ourselves.” Perhaps Mr Gates should reconsider the order, making this number one – and abiding by it in dealing with others. Even with Prime Ministers.
Vincenzina Santoro is an international economist in New York. She represents the American Family Association of New York at the United Nations.
After years of profligate spending, Greece is becoming overwhelmed. Barring some sort of large-scale bailout program, a Greek debt default at this point is highly likely. At this moment, European Central Bank liquidity efforts are probably the only thing holding back such a default. But these are a stopgap measure that can hold only until more important economies manage to find their feet. And Europe’s problems extend beyond Greece. Fundamentals are so poor across the board that any number of eurozone states quickly could follow Greece down.
And so the rest of the eurozone is watching and waiting nervously while casting occasional glances in the direction of Berlin in hopes the eurozone’s leader and economy-in-chief will do something to make it all go away. To truly understand the depth of the crisis the Europeans face, one must first understand Germany, the only country that can solve it.
Germany’s Trap
The heart of Germany’s problem is that it is insecure and indefensible given its location in the middle of the North European Plain. No natural barriers separate Germany from the neighbors to its east and west, no mountains, deserts, oceans. Germany thus lacks strategic depth. The North European Plain is the Continent’s highway for commerce and conquest. Germany’s position in the center of the plain gives it plenty of commercial opportunities but also forces it to participate vigorously in conflict as both an instigator and victim.
Germany’s exposure and vulnerability thus make it an extremely active power. It is always under the gun, and so its policies reflect a certain desperate hyperactivity. In times of peace, Germany is competing with everyone economically, while in times of war it is fighting everyone. Its only hope for survival lies in brutal efficiencies, which it achieves in industry and warfare.
Pre-1945, Germany’s national goals were simple: Use diplomacy and economic heft to prevent multifront wars, and when those wars seem unavoidable, initiate them at a time and place of Berlin’s choosing.
“Success” for Germany proved hard to come by, because challenges to Germany’s security do not “simply” end with the conquest of both France and Poland. An overstretched Germany must then occupy countries with populations in excess of its own while searching for a way to deal with Russia on land and the United Kingdom on the sea. A secure position has always proved impossible, and no matter how efficient, Germany always has fallen ultimately.
During the early Cold War years, Germany’s neighbors tried a new approach. In part, the European Union and NATO are attempts by Germany’s neighbors to grant Germany security on the theory that if everyone in the immediate neighborhood is part of the same club, Germany won’t need a Wehrmacht.
There are catches, of course — most notably that even a demilitarized Germany still is Germany. Even after its disastrous defeats in the first half of the 20th century, Germany remains Europe’s largest state in terms of population and economic size; the frantic mindset that drove the Germans so hard before 1948 didn’t simply disappear. Instead of German energies being split between growth and defense, a demilitarized Germany could — indeed, it had to — focus all its power on economic development. The result was modern Germany — one of the richest, most technologically and industrially advanced states in human history.
Read:
“We cannot have reform of the system driven by what each country sees that it needs for itself,” Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, told the Davos forum on Saturday. “We need to have co-ordination – we cannot afford to have different solutions in different parts of the world.”
Bankers fight controls
As Davos ends, bankers fight to fend off controls on matters ranging from bonuses to proprietary trading and derivatives.
Business is a necessary good
A Tale of Two Entrepreneurs
NPR’s Morning Edition had a touching piece the other day that illustrated how great a blessing business can be, and just how terrible things can be when there’s no freedom to innovate, produce, and create wealth. Chana Joffe-Walt and Adam Davidson of Planet Money put together the narrative of George Sassine of Haiti and Fernando Capellan of the Dominican Republic, “Island Of Hispaniola Has Two Varied Economies.”