Niall Ferguson: The Failure of the European Union and the Decline of the West

Niall Ferguson quotes from today's Globe and Mail:

The european core, which is really Germany, reaps the benefit of the weak Euro. But in the less productive periphery austerity is being inflicted. This is nothing less than the disintegration of Europe. 

Or what we said in: The Euro: A Weapon of Economic Mass Disruption

On the economic integration of Europe:

Ultimately, it was a conspiracy by the European elite against their electorates. 

 As we also said in: The Facist New World Order.

On Europe's insignificance on the World stage:

Every now and then the Americans try to whip Europe into shape via NATO, but over all, Europe is enormously invisible in the international arena.

 All of which suggests that Europe's leadership is fundamentally incompetent, dishonest and dangerous. Ferguson calls that pusillanimity -- "Latin, for weakness or vacillation of spirit. It's a nice word for cowardice or, in the vernacular, lack of balls. Pusillanimity of leadership is one of the big problems of our time."

In an interview with Michael Posner for the Globe and Mail, Ferguson points out that it is globalization, i.e., free trade with four billion third worlders earning pennies an hour, that is impoverishing low-skilled european workers, a point we have made, as for example in : What's Wrong With Europe and What Needs to Be Done About It.

It is good to see that despite the silence on this issue by all politicians and virtually all economists, I am not the only person pointing out the elephant in the room.

However, it is not just the low-skilled in the West who have suffered economically from globalization. For the first time ever, most unemployed Americans are college educated, and more than half of all people younger than 25 in the U.S. with bachelor's degrees are unemployed or under-employed.

Among older workers, competition from India and other developing nations has hardly helped computer programmers find well paid work in Europe and the US. And the hundreds of thousands of machinists and other skilled workers in Detroit who lost their job during the last several decades can in most cases blame unrestricted low-wage competition first from Mexico, then from China and other developing regions of the Third World.

The only point in the interview on which I disagree with Ferguson concerns the literary non-entity and settler in Britain from the Indian sub-continent, who implied in a review of Ferguson's work that Ferguson is a "racist." This, says Ferguson, was "malicious and defamatory" and he does not intend to take it "sitting idly."

I think this is a totally unproductive line to take, indeed counterproductive. Ferguson should just tell the lying fucker to eat shit and then forget about it. To deny such spurious charges only spreads the libel and diverts energy from useful endeavors.