A rare piece of economic common sense from our Western media .. (paywalled so selected quotes)...
The desire to work and earn a living has been crushed out of the population by high welfare and high taxes.
No one, for good electoral reasons, can speak the truth. Western free market economies have tanked, and the only way they can recover is by enforcing measures that would probably be morally repugnant in social democratic societies.
Future historians will devote vast works to the bizarre decisions made in the early 21st century by governments which might have been expected to know the fundamental rules of capitalist economics.
Is your country’s economy flagging, failing to produce enough wealth to sustain a mountain of debt? Well then, just print some more.
The trouble is that these more recent experiments were messing with people’s minds in a profound way. The changes that were being financed by a flood of fiat money now went very deep in the consciousness of ordinary people whose attitudes to social contact, human relationships and – critically – paid work were being manipulated to suit what governments had decided were the requirements of the moment.
Many of the traditional assumptions about what constituted virtuous behaviour in adult life – affection to elderly relations, attendance at family gatherings, participation in community events and earning a living, were suddenly turned upside down. It was now wickedly irresponsible to hug your grandparents, to join in any gathering of more than a few people or to leave home to go to a place of work.
This situation is unsustainable and everyone in the governing class knows it. They also know that the only way of reversing this is for governments to stop being complicit with it.
Taxation must be drastically reduced by raising the absurd thresholds that make taking on an entry-level job a fool’s mission, thus ruling out the route to any future career. That will be costly in the short-term but will pay for itself quite quickly. Even more important, the benefit system, which locks those who may be anxious and depressed as a consequence of their isolation, into permanent inactivity, must be dismantled.
The immediate effect of this will be uproar from the usual sources, but it will pay for itself too, not just in fiscal terms but in wellbeing in the true sense of the word.
It will take nerve to speak those truths that everyone can recognise, but the alternative is economic ruin and the collapse of what has been the most successful political formula in human history for liberating potential talent and personal responsibility.
Current political, social and economic trends are deeply worrying.
As someone who lives in Europe (the continent, not the EU) I have to believe it is not too late; but I agree it looks bleak. My thoughts are that we have been here before. The 1970's was a similar time in much of Europe. So there is still hope!