Europe, ex-vassal of Putin and Uncle Sam, is now embracing only the latter as the former is viewed increasingly as abusive. When worried about woke, US citizens would be well inspired of contemplating Europe. A state of the art French made anti-Cholesterol medication vastly superior to statins is sold in the USA for people with genetic hypercholesteromia (as yours truly). It’s very expensive, but US insurance pays for the French drug. One can also get that French drug in France. However, the French drug is used preventively in the US… and only curatively in France. So in France one needs to have a stroke first, and then maybe the drug shall be given… Whereas in the US, one can avoid the stroke to start with…
Speaking of France, the ecologists passed a lwa forbidding to extract French shale gas… Hey, that was important, there is one century worth of it… Better to get the gaz from Putin, and now Wyoming…
A huge self-inflicted wound in France and much of the EU is red tape. It’s analogous to Ling Chi, death by a thousand cuts. Except in Medieval China it was inflicted to serious criminals, whereas Ling Chi in Europe is inflicted to an innocent population.
Basically, on top of French laws which are twenty centuries old (some of them), there is a whole new layer of EU laws and directives. That red tape is seriously hindering the most industrial nations of the EU (France, Germany, Netherlands). For example, there are six different types of rentals in France…
Also the refusal of deficit spending (up to very recently) has led to a massively overvalued Euro…
Europe in general and Germany in particular cuddled to Putin after 1999, making Putin all what he came to be. Germany terminated nuclear energy and embraced coal. Germany thought the Chinese couldn’t duplicate German industry. Germany thought investing in German infrastructure was unworthy. Now huge orders of US weapons (instead of European ones) will not make things easier… Long term. Germany was told, by the US, to revive its defense spending for nearly eight years now. Still waiting…
That means that European countries consider that their defense force is the US! They are unarmed vassals. Red tape means all the start ups and domineering high tech companies end up in the USA.
The only country that has a Defense Industrial Base independent of the US in Europe is France, which also has the only independent nuclear industry. This puts the rest of Europe in a strange situation: European defense and energy independence, means to bolster France (world’s 2nd weapon exporter). France must ignore its deficit… the way the USA long has done… And if it makes the Euro tank, so much the better.
Europe’s Economic Laggards Have Become Its Leaders
More than a decade after painful austerity, Greece, Portugal and Spain have been growing faster than traditional powerhouses like Germany… Now Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is dragging down the region’s fortunes. It has been struggling to pull itself out of a slump set off by soaring energy prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. …
How have Greece, Spain and Portugal pulled ahead?
After years of international bailouts and harsh austerity programs, southern European countries made crucial changes that have attracted investors, revived growth and exports and reversed record-high unemployment.
Governments cut red tape and corporate taxes to stimulate business and pushed through changes to their once-rigid labor markets, including making it easier for employers to hire and fire workers and reducing the widespread use of temporary contracts. They moved to reduce sky-high debts and deficits, luring international pension and investment funds to start buying their sovereign debt again.
What has happened in Germany?
For decades, Germany grew steadily, but instead of investing in education, digitization and public infrastructure during those boom years, Germans grew complacent and dangerously dependent on Russian energy and exports to China.
The result has been two years of near-zero growth, landing the country in last place among its Group of 7 peers and the eurozone countries. When measured year-over-year, the country’s economy shrank 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2024.
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JN from New York objected that:
@Patrice Ayme – “Basically, on top of French laws which are twenty centuries old …” Are you sure? Twenty centuries mean those are laws of the Roman Empire.
PA this is worth answering because it goes to the core of why France behaved differently… and created Europe. Basically France was Rome without the fundamental mistake of the Roman Empire. @JN Francia was the successor state of Rome. French law was always Roman law. The Lex Salica was written first in Latin and applied entangled and in parallel with Roman law.
When Roman emperor Justinian refurbished Roman law in the mid Sixth Century, the refurbishment was immediately applied in France…. whose king Clovis had been, two generations earlier, Roman Consul (and Roman “imperator” just like his father Childeric). The Franks and Constantinople were (more than) allied from 450 CE until 1204 (when a Frankish army seized Constantinople).
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Jürgen, Berlin Germany
@Patrice Ayme Red tape in Germany is often self inflicted. Just look at the DIN norms making building houses so expensive.
@Jürgen So it is in France. It is to the point that declaring one’s rent, either as renter or landlord is becoming apocalyptic, and more and more people are going underground. France has six types of rent, plus six types of ecological level and six types of CO2 emission levels. Lodgings with too low in efficiency or too high in CO2 cannot be rented. The level of no-rent is becoming worse year after year. This means that there are 216 types of rentals possible, and they vary in time.
A similar situation holds with cars. Extravagant taxes can be applied, 150% of the price of a new car.. If the car is deemed not efficient. Efficiency is from CO2 emissions and mass of the vehicle, etc.
Patrice Ayme
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 