Some of them appear to be living in a quasi-Marxist internationalist fantasy world. The motto of the pro-EU left may as well be: “We want to destroy Europe in order to save it!”
The EU and Eurozone are outrageous, catastrophic neoliberal disasters. They have caused tremendous suffering. The EU is a corporate tyranny of unelected and incompetent neoliberal lunatics. They are basically destroying Europe as we speak.
If the people of Europe want a supra-national state, let them have it in the future by democracy after the present EU and the ideology of neoliberalism have been torn to shreds.
As far as I am concerned it’s time to make fun of the pro-EU left. Merciless ridicule, derision and scorn is what they deserve.
In that spirit, here is a quick effort:
If you agree, perhaps you would like to share this image on social media, etc.?
You have to remember to the international socialist steeped in Marxist ideology, a worker has no country.
ReplyDeleteThat's the core belief on which the edifice of post-hoc justification is built.
When I use the 'Well Japan seems to be managing ok with zero net migration, an island economy and an ageing population without joining a supranational entity' argument I get this.
"Japan is a monoculture"
Charming.
"You have to remember to the international socialist steeped in Marxist ideology, a worker has no country. "
DeleteYep. That is absolutely correct. Mind you, as I have said before here, there are useful insights in Marx, but you can take the useful insights and ditch the dogma and rubbish. Modern Marxists are basically cultists.
As for Japan, the claim that their aging population will inevitably cause some disaster seems nonsense to me, given that it is highly probable that productivity and employment will be radically changed this century by automation, robotics and AI.
Anyway, if they want more children they can design social policies and pro-family policies to make people have more children.
As for monoculture, well, frankly, that is their democratic choice, and, anyway, a sensible liberal national culture is a good thing, as I've argued here:
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2016/01/extreme-multiculturalism-versus-liberal.html
Also, there is this insane "open borders" cult on the left today. Don't people know this is an anarcho-capitalist and right-wing libertarian idea?
DeleteIncidentally, as for "automation, robotics and AI," I am not at all worried. Admittedly, there may be transitional issues, but sooner or later, we will experience a new level of liberation - after all, the Marxist cult of the physical worker is based on a dehumanising myth, which is no better than the notion that may have been widespread in the 1970s and earlier that only the select few (scientists) can handle computers.
DeletePeople who are now still tied to obtuse physical work, will be given an opportunity to exercise the core competence of the human: creative intelligence.
People who would have been digging ditches 100 years ago are creating sophisticated software today, because they are given the chance to work in a more creative line of business.
LK
Deletei thought a lot about automation and AI
and in some way i thought that as far as there is no unlimited amount of materials and unlimited amount of energy.
with enough demand side policy in the end AI and robots will cost high enough to allow people to compete with them if you pressure demand high enough.
what do you think about that?
Also, there is this insane "open borders" cult on the left today. Don't people know this is an anarcho-capitalist and right-wing libertarian idea
DeleteYes, Bernie Sanders has called that a "Koch brothers" policy. But I seem to recall having seen some essays by Libertarians who have cooled off on the idea.
Yes, this automation and AI are really epochal, but the confidently positive views about them seem to be incomplete. While there have been lots of gains, they have also allowed the easier offshoring of jobs to Asia. Right now IT jobs are highly offshorable, along with many other types of jobs which require on the spot presence and expertise.
DeleteDaniel Marmur@June 3, 2016 at 5:03 AM
Delete"with enough demand side policy in the end AI and robots will cost high enough to allow people to compete with them if you pressure demand high enough.
Not sure I fully understand here. I think it is a bad mistake to oppose or retard application of AI automation to production.
The response should be: (1) demand management and (2) providing new and meaningful and economically and socially useful forms of employment -- no doubt the latter needs to be done by government when the private sector fails to provide it.
I.G.T.U.@June 3, 2016 at 4:25 AM
Delete"People who are now still tied to obtuse physical work, will be given an opportunity to exercise the core competence of the human: creative intelligence."
I broadly agree with you here, but the trouble is: some people don't want to do this or can't because their skills lie in manual labour or other work.
With mass automation, I don't think putting everyone on welfare will work.
There will need to be new and meaningful and economically and socially useful forms of employment for most people, especially for young men. The last thing you want is large numbers of lazy, irresponsible socially problematic people on welfare. To that extent, some kind of sensible social conservatism seems responsible.
LK, you are putting your finger on it. While I am convinced that in the long term we shall adjust to the new situation, as we did by shifting nearly 100% of the population out of the agricultural sector, it is important to handle the transitional challenges—huge and daunting as they are—with circumspection. A lot can go wrong if inappropriate policies are put into effect.
DeleteLK
DeleteI meant that if you inject enough demand by continous strong fiscal stimulus the capacity utilization of the economy will grow and there will be higher demand for robots and AI programs but its cost a lot (materials energy and etc) so in this case because robots will cost higher price since the system is always in full capacity it will make them more scarce commodity and in this case it will be proftiable to hire humans again.
The arguments are indeed pathetic, largely variations of the dogmatic credo whereby the world will perish unless a certain bureaucratic structure is maintained.
ReplyDeleteIf you are unwilling to join our bureaucratic structure,
you will perish economically (i.e. we will treat you as if you did not belong to Europe);
you will turn into nationalistic monsters, even fascists;
you will start waging war on one another;
and many more similar insults to our intelligence.
I begin to feel that the Minsky instability hypothesis applies to politics as well - we have had stable political conditions for many decades, which is why the people are willing to trust politicians in inordinate measure and let them isolate themselves more and more from democratic control, until we get a severe crisis of instability towards which the EU is indeed drifting.
And in reality, it is the anti-democratic EU which is driving Europe to some kind of neo-fascism.
DeleteThe terrible thing is that movements demanding a return to sensible national policies will not only be wrongly, yet effectively accused of being ("quasi"-)fascist, but such movements will be accompanied by intolerable right wing trends as well, which will make it easier to denounce the correct kind of national orientation.
DeleteThe moderate left (social democracy) having been sensibly committed to the national state (and its concrete social constituencies whose protection it was committed to) used to be a stabilising force in this regard, in my country (Germany), but it does not exist any more in this capacity. This does not bode well.
The Old Left (before the flood of New Left lunatics and the modern regressive left) was basically socially conservative and not in favour of mass immigration. The modern Left needs to take some lessons from the old Left.
DeleteI remember when the EU was officially announced in the 90s, I sat in a restaraunt reading the paper trying to get my head around the whole thing. The impression I came away with was "the wealthier countries are going to push around the less wealthy countries and make them do what they want." France & Germany were the two names that seemed to be the culprits. Guess I was close, eh?
ReplyDeleteGood intuition
DeleteVoilå
ReplyDeletehttp://www.miguelnavascues.com/2016/06/el-brexit-poco-poco-enturbia-las.html
¡Bravo!
Deleteregards,
LK
A pleasure, indeed
Delete"Anyway, if they want more children they can design social policies and pro-family policies to make people have more children."
ReplyDeleteWell, it is not like Japan have not tried many policies with this aim. They have all failed. I agree with just about everything said here, but I think it's a mistake to assume governments can make populations increase or decrease as they like. It is common for economists to assume people respond to incentives in a totally predictable way, but I see little justification for this view.
I think it would take much more aggressive/intrusive social engineering for government to change people's habits. Personally I think that's a bad idea. Low population is not such a bad thing(maybe mililtarily it is a disadvantage). Economically speaking, most people work in service sector jobs anyway. If there are less customers at restaurants, there will not need to be as many restaurant workers either. I do not see the problem there. The actual issue is whether society will be prepared to to take care of an elderly population when they are a large percentage of the population. That is a problem, but not neccessarily a more difficult one to deal with than the consequences of higher and higher population density which some people who worry about population #s seem to advocate.
But even if we assume there are economic problems, that eventually Japan for example will not have enough people to do certain jobs, the solution would not be open border lunacy. What you would want is a very carefully managed guest worker program, where people are allowed to stay in the country if they perform certain desired jobs well. Japan does this on a small scale, plenty of sane countries have similar programs. Allowing anyone and everyone who can arrive to come in actually excaberates the problems that immigrants are supposed to solve. But this kind of insanity is what the modern left advocates. (However I think the moderate left deserves criticism too, because in my opinion when push comes to shove, most moderate leftists are not going to admit that the EU is more dangerous than UKIP say, their tribal loyalties will not allow it, plus they don't want to be called fascists and racists).
The other tendency I see with people who worry about population decline is that they utilize a kind of extrapolation fallacy based on the idea that today's statistics should be interpreted as tomorrow's and the day after that ad infinitum. They calculate that at X fertility level(which is the current level), by Y date, there will be for example no Japanese people left. This is clearly silly. There is no reason at all to assume current levels of fertility will stay the same or decline further until some point of no return. Concerns about population decline are serious for small populations, like the Parsees in India for example, but for most nations, increasing of population is arguably a bigger problem.
Just before I begin, I'd like to point out that I am indeed a soft Eurosceptic, but I do believe that the EU issue is very complex. If I may provide a few different viewpoints:
ReplyDelete1) Cooperation in the European Scientific Community, and the distribution of various grants and investments in research, would suffer heavily from a Brexit.
2) The UK doesn't have the necessary expertise to renegotiate all its trade agreements (which are already rather favorable in the EU) with countries, and this would impose a rather immense cost on the economy; some WTO experts saying that it could take years.
3) To argue that the EU is undemocratic is a half-truth and doesn't take into account the EU's historical democratic trajectory. It started off as completely unelected but non-binding.
While the Commission is unelected and has the monopoly on proposing legislation, both the Council of Ministers (an elected body) and the European Parliament (also an elected body), have the right to propose amendments and vote and re-propose and re-vote. There is a very long scrutinizing process which exists to counter this supposed democratic deficit. I guess the only argument that is valid is the really low voter turnout, but that can be solved by garnering more support for the EU by setting aside (permanently, in my opinion) the implicit aims of direct political integration - or as you call it, the United States of Europe - and focus more on institutional reform. This can only occur if major power players (like the UK) as well as the people can force their hand (which we've seen by the opt-outs that Denmark and UK got for the Schengen/Euro agreements, and electing of two Pirate Party MEPs). So all hope is not lost.
4) Another very amazingly overlooked issue is the potential break-up of the UK because, from a public law perspective, Scotland has a great desire to stay with the EU, and should Britain vote to leave, this could have potentially severe political and constitutional implications for the UK.
Thus, I would prefer a sort of political evolution rather than a political revolution.