With All the Clarity and Resolve of a Suicide Bomber

Walter Williams on Euro-nomics:

What's the European response to its self-made economic malaise? They don't repeal the laws that make for a poor investment climate. Instead, through the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), they attack low-tax jurisdictions. Why? To support its welfare state, European nations must have high taxes, but if Europeans, as private citizens and businessmen, relocate, invest and save in other jurisdictions, it means less money is available to be taxed.

The real outcome of all of this for the European population? People get shafted:

Government spending exceeds 50 percent of the GDP in France and Sweden and more than 45 percent in Germany and Italy , compared to U.S. federal, state and local spending of just under 36 percent. Government spending encourages people to rely on handouts rather than individual initiative, and the higher taxes to finance the handouts reduce incentives to work, save and invest. The European results shouldn't surprise anyone. U.S. per capita output in 2003 was $39,700, almost 40 percent higher than the average of $28,700 for European nations.

Over the last decade, the U.S. economy has grown twice as fast as European economies. In 2006, European unemployment averaged 8 percent while the U.S. average was 4.7 percent. What's more, the percentage of Americans without a job for more than 12 months was 12.7 percent while in Europe it was 42.6 percent. Since 1970, 57 million new jobs were created in the U.S., and just 4 million were created in Europe.

Produce less, and you have less to redistribute anyway! But if they remove the “profit motive” to do things and eventually get to the point where the state, (whoever that is and whoever it taxes to do things) ends up being the only and controlling entrepot of feeding, clothing, and housing people, what does it matter?

In the meanwhile, John Rosenthal reports on Le Figaro selective use of the active voice and a hostile tone, one reminiscent of a weird joyous élan, but only against the right kind of bugbears of their obsession, and fear that someone is trying to “move their cheese”. The story is wedged between a non-news fluff piece about “diversity” and a security threat that gets the usual downplayed treatment so as not to scare (or inform) anyone.

This American seizure of control is worrying. In an interview with Le Figaro, Henri Lachmann, who is writing a report on the subject for major French corporations, demands that the process of rapprochement between Euronext and the NYSE be stopped.