Death By Entitlement

From Mark Steyn’s new book, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon:

[Greek protesters are] objecting to austerity measures that would end, for example, the tradition of fourteen monthly paychecks per annum. You read that right: the Greek public sector cannot be bound by anything so humdrum as temporal reality. So, when it was mooted that the “workers” might henceforth receive a mere twelve monthly paychecks per annum, they rioted. . . .

Greece is at the point in the plot where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is not just drift along with the general current but paddle as fast as it can to catch up with the Greeks. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitelements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal meltdown); the Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.

How Little Changes

Don’t you wish we could find current leaders who gave speeches like this, and backed them with action? Listen to the issues America faced in 1964, how similar they are to the ones it faces today, but how much more intelligently than current politicians Reagan presented and discussed them. Don’t miss 12:05.

Avoid All Things Euro

Here’s UBS on the potential EU breakup: “No modern fiat currency monetary unions have broken up without some form of authoritarian or military government, or civil war. … not something that can be treated as a casual issue of exchange rate policy. … The only way to hedge against a Euro break-up scenario is to own no Euro assets at all.”

The bank believes that the Euro does not work and that either the current structure will have to change, or the current membership will have to change. Read the bank’s 21-page report at Scribd.