And she may well be the last. There is absolutely no return on investment, either for her or the Italian taxpayers who funded it. How could there be? A world in which you’re expensively educated till thirty to join a government agency justifying its own expansion by manufacturing welfare fraud is almost too perfect an emblem of the European Union. Francesca will live a worse life than her parents. She will do unpaid traineeships and low-paid short-term contract work because in Europe’s catatonic labor market the young (if one calls twenty-nine “young”) are already paying the price for the lavish salaries and benefits awarded to the unsackable middle-aged. Hence,
Debt operates on certain assumptions: if you need $500 and you don’t have it, the bank will lend it to you because they think you’re likely to have 500 bucks in the near future. The older you get, the less likely the bank will assume that. If you’re seventeen and broke, it’s because you haven’t yet got your first foot on the ladder of success. But if you’re sixty-three or seventy-eight and you’re broke, it’s because that’s who you are and you’re never not going to be broke. So why should the bank lend you 500 bucks? Where’s it going to come from?
That’s the question the developed world is facing: Where’s it going to come from? A new tax? There’s nothing left to tax. By 2009, Europe was reduced to considering a levy on bovine flatulence.29 You heard that right—not a flat tax but a flatulence tax. Ireland was pondering a tax of 13 euros per cow, while in Denmark it was as high as 80 euros per cow. Is a Danish Holstein six times as flatulent as an Irish Hereford? Beats me. But somewhere in Brussels there’s a Director of the European Flatulence Agency of Regulation and Taxation (EuroFart) who’s got all the graphs. Apparently it’s to offset looming penalties each nation faces from EU legislation to combat “global warming.” The
Even allowing for the regulatory yoke Europe’s cowed citizenry labor under, the bureaucratic logic here is hard to follow. Why is some Bulgar’s Holstein allowed to increase his flatulence while the poor Jutlander’s Polled Hereford has to put a stopper in it? Is there a dearth of flatulence in the Balkans but a Code Red alert over the North Sea? Couldn’t the EU introduce flatulence offsets and let the excessively flatulent Irish trade some of their flatulence to the Carpathians?
Go back to medieval times. The gnarled old peasant is in his hovel, and one day a fellow rides up in the full doublet and hose and says he’s come from the palace to collect His Majesty’s bovine flatulence tax. It’s just three groats per cow, a footling sum of no consequence. Even the medieval simpleton rustic would say, “Aaargh, sire, I dunno. The King’s flatulence tax? That don’t sound right….” When you’re taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there’s nothing left to tax.
Greece, wrote Theodore Dalrymple, is “a cradle not only of democracy but of democratic corruption”31—of electorates who give their votes to leaders who bribe them with baubles purchased by borrowing against a future that can never pay it off. The advanced democracies with their mountains of sovereign debt are the equivalent of old people who’ve blown through their capital and are all out of ideas looking for young people flush enough to bail them out. And the idea that it might be time for the spendthrift geezers to change their ways butts up against their indestructible moral vanity. In 2009, President Sarkozy prissily declared that the G20 summit provided “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give capitalism a conscience.”32 European capitalism may have a conscience. It’s not clear it has a pulse. And, actually, when you’re burning Greek bank clerks to death in defense of your benefits, your “conscience” isn’t much in evidence, either.
This is the first crisis of globalization, and it is a far more existential threat than the Depression. In living beyond its means, its times, and its borders, the developed world has run out of places to pass the buck.
