adolf hitler

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Don’t Mention The War

angelamerkel

It is wrong to suggest that people should be held accountable for the actions of their ancestors. Blaming each other for the deeds of our ancestors is the cause of vast tracts of human suffering and conflict. Tribes and nations have fought each others for centuries — and, in some places, continue to do so — based on the actions of that tribe or nation’s forefathers. This is irrational. We cannot change the actions of our ancestors. That is perhaps one reason why John Cleese’s portrayal of an idiot hotelier beating down his German guests with a spiel of cringe-inducing World War 2 and Nazi clichés is so absurdly funny.

That being said, we do have a responsibility to learn from and not repeat the mistakes of our ancestors. Failure to learn from the mistakes of one’s ancestors is the point at which the actions of past generations become relevant in a discussion of the present.

There is a line of reasoning that suggests that the first person to compare their opponent to Adolf Hitler or Nazism in an argument on the internet just lost the argument. I tend to see this view as generally correct. The acts and beliefs of the Nazis were unusually horrific, and comparing your opponent or the person or group you are criticizing to the Nazis is often an act of rhetorical desperation, and often a symptom of a lack of imagination. However, what is generally correct is often locally wrong. Sometimes, a Nazi or World War 2 analogy really cuts to the core of a problem.

This, I believe, is one of those times. Having the German government and its allies trying to dictate to the Greek people the terms of Greece’s euro membership, the standards by which they should run their government, and economy, and civil service, and welfare state must feel painfully close to a new German occupation. Greece is a country, we should not forget, that suffered greatly under a German military occupation less than a lifetime ago. It is now experiencing a brutal and prolonged economic depression at the hands of a new generation of austerity obsessed Germans.

Greece has been a willing victim for German austerity. The Greeks have taken Merkel’s medicine. Greece has done a huge amount of spending cuts, so many in fact that by 2012 they had a primary surplus.

Unfortunately, Merkel’s and the Troika’s medicine was a load of horse shit. Instead of recovering, the Greek economy just got even more depressed. Unemployment has been at Great Depression levels ever since Merkel and the Troika began dictating how the Greeks ran their economy. Greek real GDP continues to trend downward. Indeed, Europe itself remains in an epic depression. The austerians keep making it worse.

Now, nobody is saying that the Greeks are blameless. Obviously, they took on a load of relatively unproductive debt they couldn’t afford, and they colluded with financiers to falsify economic data to get into the eurozone. But the country has already suffered massively as a result of those decisions (which of course were not Greece’s alone — the creditors clearly did not do their homework).

The goal now should be getting Greece — and the wider continent and world, which would also suffer greatly from a default cascade or economic slump as a result of the Greek crisis — out of the mess they are in. What Greece really needs is debt forgiveness. Even the IMF recognizes that Greece’s debts are unrepayable. But that is not Merkel and Schaüble’s goal. Instead of recognizing that their policies have failed, and that a change in course is necessary, their goal for Greece is complete capitulation to the stormtroopers. Their goal for Greece is punishment, in order to set an example to other euro members who might get into fiscal trouble.

The great irony — and the thing that makes the Nazi references really begin to stick — is that earlier German governments received massive debt relief. Indeed, after Germany started the Second World War — which killed 50 million people, including 6 million who died in the holocaust — it had its war debt written off, allowing the West German economy to begin to recover and rebuild. Indeed, Germany was the biggest defaulter of the 20th century. Yet now the very descendants of those Germans refuse the same treatment for today’s Greeks, whose troubles pale against the crimes of Germany’s Nazi past.

This is sickening. Not only are they shredding to pieces the European unity and the European Union that has kept war-torn Europe at piece with itself for the past seventy years, they are doing it in the name of an ignorant program of austerity that does nothing other than punish and degrade. And they are doing it in complete ignorance of how their own ancestors benefited from others’ forgiveness. Do they not understand the value of European unity? Of economic growth? Of peace or prosperity?

In choosing the path of sadomasochism, punishment and German supremacism, Schaüble and Merkel and their allies are risking turning what is already a terrible depression for the continent — and a ravaging for Greece — into something deeper, gloomier and more painful.

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Austerity & Extremism

I noted yesterday that anything the government gives you, the government can take away, and that dependency on government services — which might be withdrawn — leaves citizens weak and unfree.

One cause for the withdrawal of government that I neglected to mention (intentionally, as I hoped someone would pick it up in comments) was the matter of austerity. While the example I was bouncing my ideas off — of denying treatment to smokers or the obese — remains theoretical, the withdrawal of government services and spending as a result of austerity is very much a reality, especially in Europe.

To wit:

That more austerity produces less GDP (and very often bigger deficits due to falling tax revenues — as exemplified by Portugal) is self-evident. That society is — for lack of a better word — pissed with this outcome is the clear reality on the ground. Made dependent upon government largesse, society now finds the crutch of services, spending and government jobs withdrawn. And of course, this has political blowback.

As Tyler recently put it “nationalism is back with a bang”. But it’s not just the nationalists who are doing well, so too are the far left. Just as in the 1930s many people who have been failed by the mainstream parties are angry, and their instinctual reaction is to reject the political mainstream and look to the fringes.

Let’s look at Greece.

From the WSJ:

Two political mavericks—one a soft-spoken former Communist, the other a firebrand nationalist—are tapping into public anger at incumbents and the harsh austerity measures Greece must adopt to stay in the euro, as support for mainstream parties withers ahead of May 6 elections.

Right-wing economist Panos Kammenos and left-wing lawyer Fotis Kouvelis are poles apart ideologically. But they are currently among the most popular party leaders in Greece, and their parties have sprung from nowhere to challenge Greece’s political establishment and the austerity policies that many Greeks blame for deepening their country’s economic crisis.

Between them, Mr. Kammenos’s Independent Greeks and Mr. Kouvelis’s Democratic Left could win around 20% of the vote. Their rise is cutting deeply into support for Greece’s two mainstream parties — the conservative New Democracy party and the center-left Socialists, known as Pasok — that share power in a fractious coalition government.

Given the utter train wreck that the Greek economy is, it is shocking that these figures are not significantly higher. In the recent first round of the French Presidential election, the far left and far right polled over 30%, a post-WW2 high.

All over Europe, the unemployed and dispossessed are becoming increasingly frustrated with the status quo.

From Bloomberg:

Europe’s front against austerity has expanded in recent weeks after Spain struggled to meet European Union-imposed deficit targets, election campaigns in Greece faced anti- austerity rumblings and a revolt against extra spending cuts in the traditionally budget-conscious Netherlands propelled Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s coalition toward an early breakup.

Europe has been here before. Hitler came to power, lest we forget, on the back of a devastating period of German austerity.

As I noted in November:

After just two years of “austerity” measures, Germany’s economy had completely collapsed: unemployment doubled from 15 percent in 1930 to 30 percent in 1932, protests spread, and Bruning was finally forced out. Just two years of austerity, and Germany was willing to be ruled by anyone or anything except for the kinds of democratic politicians that administered “austerity” pain. In Germany’s 1932 elections, the Nazis and the Communists came out on top — and by early 1933, with Hitler in charge, Germany’s fledgling democracy was shut down for good.

It’s the same story; more austerity means more misery, means more political and social rumbling, means a greater support for radical political parties. We haven’t gotten anywhere near the scope or magnitude of the 1930s (yet), but the present European contraction has not dampened the technocratic fervour for deeper and faster cuts and tax hikes (which, quite obviously lead to bigger deficits, which trigger more austerity, ad infinitum). Could this at some point mean revolutions that put radicals into power? It becomes increasingly plausible.

And the initial problem in my view is excessive dependency on the state and centralisation. If the state makes up 50% of GDP, cutting spending in the interests of paying down debt will cause a severe contraction throughout the entire economy. If the state makes up 15% of GDP, less so. If the state is only a small fragment, austerity in the interests of paying down debt — even during a recession or depression — is feasible. If the state is a goliath, it will lead to a crippling economic contraction (and of course, the attendant realities of public fury and politcal extremism).

Centralised systems are always and by definition fragile to shocks and mismanagement, because the activities at the centre are transmitted throughout the entire system; poor decisions at the centre metastasise throughout the system. In a robust decentralised system, mismanagement only hurts at the local level, because there is less of a mechanism for the transmission of shocks.

The lesson sticks: anything the government gives you, the government can take away (sometimes deliberately, sometimes not). That could be healthcare, that could be security, that could be economic growth. If it’s delivered by central fiat, it’s fragile.