<blockquote>'General government in the Eurozone (which for statistical purposes includes regional and local governments) takes up approximately 50% of GDP.
This is the Eurozone’s weakness: The productive capacity of its economy is overwhelmed by the burden of too much government.'
-
Europe is Drowning Under Too Much Government, March 4, 2013</blockquote>
'..The burden on private sector is far too great for that recovery to occur..'<blockquote>'Unfortunately, governments have gotten themselves stuck into this position where they are not prepared to cut their spending enough. They think they can get taxes by taxing the rich, ratcheting up the taxes on anyone who you think has got any money -- but then people avoid it. Like in France, they just go abroad. It is that bad.
We are not seeing any recovery. The burden on private sector is far too great for that recovery to occur. Not only that, but the economies in the Eurozone are angled towards the wrong production. It is a huge great burden of malinvestment that needs to be addressed. You are not going to get any meaningful economic recovery without that slump happening.'
- Alasdair Macleod (
Europe is in Worse Shape Than Everyone Thinks, March 2, 2013)</blockquote>
'..to supplant the welfare state..'<blockquote>'The main point I am trying to make is that intelligent new approaches are available to supplant the welfare state. Political leadership may not be available, and the people might not yet be ready for radical change (though they are getting closer to being ready), but ideas and plans are available today.
- Jeff W. (
A Community-Based Alternative to the Welfare State, March 14, 2013)</blockquote>
'What you can count on is that we will return to the traditional mode of assembling human habitats..'<blockquote>'..In fact, the decline of true capital accumulation in the USA since the 1970s was offset only by the hypertrophic unnatural enlargement of the financial sector from about 5 percent of the economy to 40 percent today. The sector transformed its original mission of managing and deploying accumulated wealth for purposeful enterprise (a.k.a. investment) to sets of rackets designed to game financial mechanisms (markets, interests rates) in order to get something for nothing. It amounted to a sort of national economic self-vandalism.
Much of that putative “activity” was mere churn-for-fee hanky-panky, the wash-rinse-and-repeat cycles of institutional money managers creaming off profits from the pointless movements of money in and out of accounts. Perhaps even more of the financial sector growth was the “innovation” of new swindles and frauds, the biggest and most blatant being the housing bubble, a massive “control fraud” in which suburban houses were used to collateralize deliberately mispriced bonds (debt obligations) on the grand scale in order for giant firms to collect insurance on their failure, in addition to other fees and profits garnered for manufacturing and selling the damn things.
Much of that story remains shrouded in mystery because no prosecutions were mounted against the gigantic banks involved, there was no effort to pursue the truth or justice, and the statute of limitations clock is rapidly ticking down. What we can say about it is that the rule of law obviously got lost in shuffle, and that the continued absence of the rule of law in banking is a profound threat to civilized life. Computerization was certainly an enabler of these monumental shenanigans, and it produced one startling diminishing return: the inability of banks and governments to accurately report numbers on their balance sheets – hugely ironic given the phenomenal math abilities of computers. We find ourselves now in the unfortunate situation where accounting fraud has become the basic operating system of banking and government – not a very salutary prospect for managing civilized human affairs – while much of the nation’s business has been reduced to a sorry matrix of rackets.
..
What you can count on is that we will return to the traditional mode of assembling human habitats -- that is, integral,
walkable urban places on the variable scale of village-town-city, with work, commerce, housing, and culture woven tightly together in the recognizable form of a real civic organism, not a simulacrum or a cartoon of one — places that add up to more than the sum of their parts, places worthy of our affection that we can call “home” without irony or regret.'
- James H. Kunstler,
Why Our Current Way of Living Has No Future, March 6, 2013</blockquote>
Context<blockquote>
Extremely Difficult to Keep Up With Economic Stupidity, March 14, 2013
Massive Ships 12-Miles Offshore to Provide Floating City for Entrepreneurial Start-Ups; Launch Date Q2 2014, March 15, 2013</blockquote>