EU's fanatical 'saviors' destroying Greece, EU

Cohen draws a stunning historical parallel:

"The EU's terms do not begin to match the altruism the United States showed to the defeated Germans after 1945.... Greece has invaded no one and committed no crimes against humanity. Yet the EU, which boasts that solidarity is its founding principle, is forcing it into destitution and chaos."

Is Cohen right, that mere hubris by EU officials who don't want to admit their beloved idea of a currency union was ill-conceived, is driving their insane behavior to "save" the EU by destroying its member states?

Greece is being destroyed by 'respectable' fanatics

By Nick Cohen

February 19, 2012 | Observer

Greek democracy is being destroyed. Not by soldiers marching with insane slogans on their lips about the inevitable triumph of the German master race, international proletariat or global jihad, but by moderate men and women who think themselves immune to ideological frenzy. Greece's enemies are novel, but no less frightening for that: extremists from the centre ground; the respectable running riot.

Which ever way you cut it, Greece can't win. The EU "bailout" cannot perform the first function of a rescue and save the sufferer from suffering. The Germans, with Dutch and Finnish assistance, are pushing Greece into a death spiral. The EU demands that Greece cuts 150,000 public jobs over three years – the equivalent in terms of population of our government taking 800,000 jobs from the UK public sector. Greek politicians must also accept without a quibble a 22% cut in the minimum wage and further reductions in the welfare state.

Greece is in permanent recession. The economy shrank by 7% in the three months to December 2011. Tens of thousands of family businesses have gone bust. Europe is now offering to revive Greece by impoverishing it; to heal it by harming it. As Tacitus said of the Roman legions' earlier attempt to impose a European union: "They make a desert and call it peace."

Whether Greek society can stand the pressure remains an open question. The parties of the far left and right are flourishing in the polls as the public comes to see its centrist politicians as traitors for trying to appease a hostile EU. Once the Grecian fringe was reserved for the unhinged. The last time I asked Liana Kanelli, spokeswoman for the Greek Communist party, about her country's crisis, she flew off into a rage about how the 1999 Nato intervention to stop Serb nationalists slaughtering Kosovo Muslims was an imperialist plot to extend capitalism into the Balkans. Nothing I could say could wake her from her land of make-believe and return her to the subject at hand.

Her fellow citizens no longer see Kanelli and her kind as dangerous fools, however. Because they oppose the EU, cranks from the left and racists from the right now make more sense to Greeks than their mainstream politicians. The parallels with the 1930s are too obvious to labour.

Whatever the political consequences, every sensible financial commentator understands that the Greek economy can take no more. The "bailout" will merely push it deeper into the mire. The EU's terms do not begin to match the altruism the United States showed to the defeated Germans after 1945. America did not pauperise West Germans as many in France and indeed Washington wanted. America guaranteed their security, then gave them loans from the Marshall Plan that allowed the West German economic miracle to begin. Greece has invaded no one and committed no crimes against humanity. Yet the EU, which boasts that solidarity is its founding principle, is forcing it into destitution and chaos.

The alternative to bowing to the demands of their German overlords is not noticeably better. If Greece were to leave the euro, there would be hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of law suits, as parties argued whether contracts should be honoured in the old or new currency. Hyper-inflation might set in. The European banking system might collapse. As William Hague says, the euro is a burning building with no exits.

The EU cannot take responsibility for what it has done and be magnanimous for reasons British readers may not grasp. Raised in a Eurosceptic country, we do not understand how an absolute commitment to the European project was a mark of respectability on the continent. Like going to church and saying your prayers for previous generations, a public demonstration of commitment to the EU ensured that the world saw you as a worthy citizen. If you wanted to advance in Europe's governing parties, judiciaries, bureaucracies and culture industries, you had to subscribe to the belief that ever-greater union was self-evidently worthwhile.

Currency union is – self-evidently – a disaster. Admitting that would bring a loss of face too great for the European elites to bear. To take the most discreditable example, Germany and Holland have benefited enormously from the single currency holding down the exchange rate for their goods, while imposing effective tariff barriers on southern Europe.

Instead of saying: "We are rich because they are poor", Angela Merkel and her boorish colleagues imitate the smug, parochial, selfish Bild reader, who thinks that foreigners' problems would be solved if only they could turn themselves into him. Germany insists that the Greek crisis is the result of the corruption of Greek public life. Greek politics is undoubtedly corrupt, although I should add that the first victims of corruption are poor Greeks who cannot afford to bribe officials or hide their savings from the taxman.

But Greek corruption cannot explain why Portugal is in crisis, any more than Italian corruption can explain why Ireland and Spain are in crisis. All five countries are suffering – and France may soon be suffering – because the euro is a monumental mistake. Rather than rectify it, European leaders attack the welfare states, employment protections and public services that the best of the European centre-left fought for after 1945. In the name of saving the euro, everything must go.

As the poverty deepens and the protests swell, the EU's image will change – and not for the better. It was once seen as a haven, which offered Europeans an escape from the terrors of the past. The EU, wrote the perceptive British diplomat Robert Cooper in 2002, is at the forefront of the "postmodern world". Instead of invading each other, Europeans allowed negotiators at Brussels to settle conflicts and regulate everything "right down to beer and sausages".

The EU may have been petty and irritating. It may not have been very democratic. But its avoidance of conflict produced a pleasant, prosperous and peaceful continent.

Europe does not seem pleasant, prosperous or peaceful today. When historians write about the end of its postmodern utopia, they will note that it was not destroyed by invading armies anxious to plunder Europe's wealth or totalitarian ideologues determined to install a dictatorship, but by politicians and bureaucrats, who appeared to be pillars of respectability, but turned out to be fanatics after all.

Studies: Charitable giving irrational, favors pain, not totally altruistic

The facts of human beings' emotional, irrational reactions to appeals for charity is just one more reason not to depend on private charity to take care of our brothers and sisters in need.

We should take advantage of government's economies of scale and rely on professional bureaucrats' dispassionate planning to ensure an adequate social safety net for our fellow citizens.

Why Do We Give? Not Why Or How You Think

By Alix Spiegel

November 25, 2011 | All Things Considered on NPR

New findings in the science of charity reveals some counter-intuitive results. For instance, people will give more money to a single suffering person than to a population of suffering people, and also give more when some type of physical discomfort — for example, running a marathon — is involved.

GUY RAZ, HOST: This time of year, pleas for donations are as plentiful as eggnog and door-buster sales. Americans give around $300 billion a year to charity. And as NPR's Alix Spiegel reports, psychologists have started to look more closely at when and why we're motivated to give.

ALIX SPIEGEL, BYLINE: The science of charity took off in earnest in the late 1990s, but the series of papers that attempted to understand a puzzling psychological phenomena: When people give to charity, they'll give far more money to a single suffering person than to a population of suffering people, which charity researcher Chris Olivola, of the University of Warwick, says doesn't make a lot of sense.

DR. CHRIS OLIVOLA: You should be more interested in helping more people than fewer, right? You should be more interested in helping 10 sick children than you should be interested in helping one of those 10.

SPIEGEL: But that isn't how it works. In fact, Olivola says tell donors about even two hungry children or give them statistics about hungry children generally and donations will fall by half.

ALLA VOLA: In fact, I think one of the troubling results is if you give people the photo of the child and the statistics, people are less moved than just the child. So, statistics plus photo is just like statistics by itself.

SPIEGEL: These strange findings, says Alla Vola(ph), helped inspire other charity researchers. And last year, Alla Vola and a co-author published many of their resulting studies in a book called "The Science of Giving." This book includes all kinds of surprising experiments, which examine our quirky relationship to charity, including Alla Vola's own work on a kind of charity that now seems completely ordinary: marathoning for a cause.

VOLA: On the face of it, you know, it seems great that people are making this sort of, I would say, sacrifice, but if you stopped and think about, it's kind of puzzling, right?

SPIEGEL: Marathons and other charity events of that kind are essentially asking people to suffer real physical discomfort for the privilege of then giving money, a formula that Alla Vola says probably wouldn't fly in the commercial world. If I'm going to try to sell you a car, I don't ask you to run a race first. But with charity, Alla Vola says, the more you ask people to suffer, the better.

VOLA: When people anticipate they're going to have to suffer to raise money for a charity, then their willingness to contribute to that cause actually goes up.

SPIEGEL: So, for example, in his research, Alla Vola gathered groups of people, gave them each $5 then made it possible for them to contribute a portion of that money to what amounted to a charity. But for half of the participants, there was an additional requirement before they were allowed to donate.

VOLA: If you want to give any money to the group, you're going to have to put both your hands in very, very cold, painfully cold, water for 60 seconds - very painful task.

SPIEGEL: Now, the people who were not asked to suffer only gave about $3; and the people who were asked to suffer?

VOLA: What we found was that people in that condition, the cold water condition, gave more money. They gave four out of five dollars to the group, even though we basically give them incentive not to give.

SPIEGEL: Another interesting new finding comes from an Israeli psychologist at Ben Gurion University named Tehila Kogut. Kogut says that in Israel, like in America, people are constantly bombarded with telephone requests from charities seeking funds. And she says most of her friends have a method for dealing with these calls.

TEHILA KOGUT: They just don't pick up your phone when they don't recognize the number because they don't want to be asked for a donation. They say, why don't you say just no? Well, it's a problem to pick up the phone and say no.

SPIEGEL: To better understand why people avoid saying no, Kogut did a series of studies which ultimately made clear that people give to charity not just out of altruism or empathy but also curiously to protect themselves. Say you're called on a phone by a cancer charity and asked to donate. Well, the very act of being asked, Kogut says, brings on a miniature existential crisis.

KOGUT: They feel that if they say no, the probability that they will have cancer, it will increase. That this is an act of tempting fate.

SPIEGEL: Giving then is in part an attempt to ward off disaster. Now, as for implementing some of these insights, most of the researchers interviewed said that so far relatively few charitable organizations seem to be using the research on giving to shape their appeals. They should, though, Alla Vola says. (unintelligible) has a lot to say about when and why we give. Alix Spiegel, NPR News, Washington.