Beck Commentary for June 7th, 2012

As we face the future of the EU zone, it appears more clearly that the cost of survival to capitalism in EU cannot be found without its abandonment of the predatory version that has been its model since the Milton Friedman model took over the Economics profession. By contrast, the only Social Democratic country to be tested in this period was Iceland, which allowed its economically irresponsible banks to go bankrupt and used its economic muscle to nationalize them, doing better than nationalizing the debt and bailing out the bankers, as USA has done.  Socialism without the medieval tradition of Russia or China has given Scandinavia a democratic social structure without a history of brutal suppression of counter-revolutionary forces and a history of gulags. And these countries are among those with superlative scores for social contentment, with only a few of the wealthier counties joining them for what can only rival them for what we must reckon as economic success. Yet the propaganda machine of predatory capitalism has persuaded the likes of the USA electorate that those gulags are the unavoidable products of even the mildest forms of social thinking, and they also ignore the prosperity of the people who live that way, in most cases without significant mineral resources.  As we watch Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland teeter on the edge of the ash pit of predatory capitalism, with which they are threatened by the failed EU adoption of this 300-year old model of supposed automatic prosperity, it is time for us to learn what we need from Lord Keynes and FDR.