The thing about Europe: it’s the actual land of the free now
The thing about Europe: it’s the actual land of the free now
Paywall? https://archive.is/Tq3KD
The thing about Europe is its economy is permanently stuck in the doldrums, a global cautionary tale. And no wonder. Europeans enjoy August off, retire in their prime and spend more time eating and socialising with their families than inhabitants of any other region. Oddly, surveys show people in countries both rich and poor value such leisure time; somehow Europeans managed to squeeze their employers into giving them more of it. Even as they were depressing GDP by wasting time playing with their kids, the denizens of Europe also managed to keep inequality relatively low while it ballooned elsewhere in the past 20 years. Nobody in Europe has spent the past week looking at their stock portfolio, wondering if they could still afford to send their kids to university. Europeans have no idea what “medical bankruptcy” is. Oh, and no EU leader has ever launched their own cryptocurrency.
This whole paragraph had me on edge, a little unsure of whether The Economist, (edit for clarity: from presumably) an American publication (wing), legitimately thought these were good things or not.
The Economist is British. This is absolutely about ridiculing Americans and their ridiculous ideas of being the envy of the world.
The tongue is firmly in the cheek.
I hope so, because in a decade of subscribing to that magazine I've often seen variants of the "worker rights are bad for the Economy" pitch in their articles and they were dead serious about it.
I take your point. The economist is anti union and pro free trade, but the last 3 sentences of this particular columnist are anti Trump and spoken truthfully.
The Economist are about as pure Neoliberal as it gets, whilst Trump and his minions are Fascists which is an ideology were the State sits above Money in the hierarchy of power (though, unlike in Democracy, the State under Fascism is not controlled by citizens), which is exactly the reverse order of what Neoliberals defend, so they're enemies.
What they both agree, however, is that the common people with their vote should not control the highest power in the land.
So I'm still suspicious those words were kinda tongue in cheek.
an American publication
According to Wikipedia, its mostly written and edited in London, and was started in Britain in the 1800s (to raise support for abolishing import tariffs in fact)
I kind of got both that impression and its exact opposite, like the whole paragraph feels like a long wink and a nudge, like the author would like to say "maybe fixating on 'line go up' distracts you from all that is good in life" but that would negate The Economist's entire raison d'être.
It's like Schrodinger's argument.
The Economist is a very Neoliberal British magazine (I should know, I had a subscription for almost a decade) and as such they have the vices of both:
So yeah, of course for them America sliding into Fascism isn't the fault of the explosion of inequality and total freezing of Social Mobility there, which was the direct consequence of 4 decades of Neoliberalism and the destruction or defanging of all powers in the land (including Unions and the State) except for the Power Of Money, and of course Europe is "problematic" because they haven't destroyed enough Unions, Worker Rights and other non-Money powers and workers are still entitled to things like a month of vacations, retiring before they're dead and time for activities other than sleeping and working (oh, the horror!).
These guys have basically the ideology of the Democrat Party leadership, but only on Economics and with a British twist, possibly even harder Neoliberal (so, even more Rightwing, though towards Oligarchy rather than Fascism), and they certainly see it as their mission to "make opinion" (not Journalism) so their stories are almost invariably spined in some way to sell their ideology.
