You Can't Spell "Cypriot" Without "Riot"

It's been a few days since the news broke, and the angry aftermath has set in.  Protests in Nicosia, the revolt of the Cypriot lawmakers against the bailout proposal, and the prospect of no end to the debt crisis.

I am bemused by how some people/analysts/bureaucrats are calling the proposed "let's grab a chunk of depositors' money" ploy the Orwellian term of "deposit levy" or even "tax."  I'll just quote a piquantly relevant response:

This is not really about Cyprus, of course, but about the precedent that is being set there. In exchange for an infusion of capital into the nation's banks, Cyprus is being asked to impose a "special bank levy" ... This is described as a "wealth tax," except that it's not a tax. A tax is a regular rule that operates uniformly according to a pre-determined formula. A one-time, ad hoc seizure of money isn't a tax. It is confiscation. Or we can use a plainer word for it: theft.

If you want a Puckish application of this whole mess, I give you the incomparable Instapundit, who recently suggested:

... an enterprising GOP member of the House or Senate would introduce a bill immediately to make such shenanigans illegal — and dare the Dems to oppose it.

Put those Dems on the defense.  It's a brilliant idea ... which means establishment GOP leaders and pseudo-cons will be too stupid to adopt it.  Hey, Rand Paul, are you listening?

Quote of the Day: the Bailout Debacle in Cyprus

Have you been watching the nightmare unfolding in Cyprus over the weekend?  It actually took me a couple hours before I could believe what I was seeing.  Imagine waking up and realizing that 6.7% to 9.9%  3%-15% (updated figures) of your savings accounts have been - oh, let's just say it - confiscated.  It might be a way to get back at dodgy Russian oligarchs using Cyprus and possibly money-laundering and whatever, but it's a horrible precedent and plenty of ordinary Cypriots are getting screwed.  This passionate rant gives us the quote of the day:

"The establishment of the principle that a government can, and at times of economic strain must, help itself to your savings, and that this is a legitimate tool of statecraft, ought to provoke riots. I am amazed at the tranquillity with which it has been accepted so far."

Perhaps there aren't any riots yet because everybody is right now busy sprinting to the ATMs.  Hell, I would!  Once folks figure out that they can't get to their money, then I'll expect panic to turn into rage.

Hey, remember all that crazy talk about how cash-strapped governments might start raiding people's retirement accounts?  Doesn't sound so crazy now, does it?  Meanwhile, all those jokes that the Cine-Sib and I used to make about putting your money into your mattress instead of a bank ("Haha, I'm sure my Sealy Posturepedic can give me a better interest rate") now aren't so funny anymore.

Anyway, the thought occurs to me as I watch Cyprus: the leadership in the euro zone could scarcely do a better job of crashing that country if they were trying to do so.  I mean, look at what's been done in the name of "saving it."  When you spark panicked bank runs in the name of saving anything, I think it's fairly safe to say that you've screwed the proverbial pooch.

PS: Interesting (and prescient) anecdote.

Euro Notes: Quote of the Day on the Spain Bailout

Heh (via Samizdata):

Could Brussels have been taken over by saboteurs, a secret army of eurosceptic infiltrators and spies masquerading as officials? 

I only ask because it now almost seems as if Spain’s bailout was deliberately designed not merely to fail but to inflict maximum damage on the Spanish economy and the entire Eurozone. Rarely have I seen such incompetence.

Euro Notes: $170 Billion Bailout for Greece

Will it prevent a Greek default?  Everyone hopes so.  Well, you can certainly hope for the best, but the other half of that advice is "but prepare for the worst."  I'm bringing the "train wrecks" tag out of retirement.

Satire Alert: Remy Vs. the Clint Eastwood Super Bowl Spot

Take a look at the delightful Remy's latest effort - a parody of the Eastwood "Halftime in America" TV spot that I had me rolling my eyes and longing for stupid beer commercials.  Remy, you deserve your own blog category tag!  UPDATE: IOWAHAWK!

Go ahead.  Make my day bailout.

6 Ideas for the Ash Heap of History

Here's an interesting list from Foreign Policy. 

Lessons from the European Fiscal Crisis

Consider this.

Euro Notes: Greece and the Eurocrats

Oh, dear.   The slow-motion train wreck that is the Greek catastrophe in recent days has reached the point at which I am compelled to have "train wrecks" as an actual blog post category tag.

Self-evident metaphor.

Quote of the Day: Protests and Missing the Mark

From British MEP Daniel Hannan on the various and variously intellectually incoherent Occupy [Insert Location Here] protests:

The hard-Left protesters who marched in cities across the world today are wrong about many things, but they have got one thing absolutely right: bailing out first banks and then entire countries, is a form of class war against working people. 

The trouble is, the demonstrators are picking the wrong target. The people they should blame are not the financiers, but the politicians who obsequiously agreed to rescue them from the consequences of their malinvestments. 

Please understand, my Leftie friends, that what has taken place since 2008 is anything but capitalism. In a capitalist system, incompetent banks would have been allowed to fail, their profitable operations sold on to their competitors. Shareholders, bondholders and some depositors would have lost money, but taxpayers would not have contributed a penny.

Well, yes.  If these protesters had the least understanding of actual capitalism versus the perverse crony capitalism currently being practiced by corrupt-ocrats on both sides of the Pond and if these angry demonstrators actually had two economically-literate neurons to rub together, they'd be marching on government buildings.  But, of course, they don't.  And, so life imitates "Star Trek II": "You've managed to kill everyone else, but like a poor marksman, you keep missing the target!"  UPDATE: By the way, La Parisienne and I would like to note for the record that we always thought the massive government bailouts were stupid, but of course nobody listens to us.

The European Bailouts: A View From Finland

How often do we get a perspective from the Finns?  Interesting.

A Little Euro-Economic Humor: the €100 Note

From Samizdata comes this little jest:

It is a slow day in a damp little Irish town. The rain is beating down and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day a rich German tourist is driving through the town, stops at the local hotel and lays a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night. The owner gives him some keys and, as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100 note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the €100 note and runs down the street to repay his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the €100 note and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel. The guy at the Farmers' Co-op takes the €100 note and runs to pay his drinks bill at the pub. The publican slips the money along to the local prostitute drinking at the bar, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer him "services" on credit. The hooker then rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note. The hotel proprietor then places the €100 note back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the €100 note, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves town. No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism. And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how the bailout package works.

The Power of a Rant

The Cafe Hayek blog has this note about the famous Santelli Rant of February 2009, which I covered here and here.  As something of a ranter and connoisseur of rants myself, I must say, kudos, Mr. Santelli.  Rant on!

Heroes and Villains of Imaginary Worlds: A Primer of Tropes

Here are 5 general kinds of heroes and 5 general kinds of villains.  The Cine-Sib just now informed me that he's the "everyman" type of hero.  As for me, guess ... No, too easy.  He said I was the "anti-hero" kind of hero.    He identifies with Peter Parker ("Crouching Moron, Hidden ..." or "Obfuscating Stupidity"), and apparently I'm the Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds type ("Loveable Rogue," "Jerk with a Heart of Gold").  O RLY?  He also just accused me of having this, which I admittedly don't deny. I might be horrible, but I try to be honest on this blog, ha!

Quote of the Day: Stupidity and Bad Behavior

From movie critic and editorialist Kyle Smith:

Stupidity is not the same thing as irresponsibility.

We're getting plenty of both from all directions these days, though.  BONUS: Smith rips into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with this:

They used their implicit government backing to behave like spoiled rich kids who knew that if they ever got drunk and crashed the Porsche, their daddy would bail them out — then buy them a new car.

Oh, snap!

Quote of the Day: Obama's Policies and the Recession

It's basically madness, isn't it, to hike taxes and entitlements and government spending during a time of recession? Here is the quote of the day:

If the totally irresponsible new Obamacare entitlements end up costing more than planned when they start in 2014, as is likely, the phrase "adding fuel to the fire" seems inadequate. How about firebombing the fire?

If this is supposed to be the US government coming to save us all, then I have only this to say:

Euro Notes: Analyzing the Greek Implosion In the Light of History

Here is the latest on the Greek debacle.

Tragedy or Farce? the Greek Bailout Spawns Violent Protests

I don't even know how to tackle this. Greece is a prostrate mess of debt and bad accounting. That's bad enough. Now it's getting a massive bailout from EU members who are (understandably) angry at having to help out their wayward colleague. And now the Greeks are furious that the bailout will mean they must take up harsh austerity measures.

What, did they think there would be no pain?

Here is an interesting pair of quotes, though:

1) Vaggelis Gettos, 24, is just as alarmed at the burden being heaped on the young by austerity measures expected to be announced today, and has pledged to resist them in more protests this week against what he sees as a plot to impoverish Greece.

“We will live much worse than our parents,” he said. “Why should we be made to pay for their mistakes?”

2) Economists regard the bloated civil service with its jobs for life and generous pensions as a cancer consuming the country’s resources. The older generation, the experts grimly concur, turned the state into a giant cash machine to be plundered at will.

That's right -- it's a plot to impoverish Greece. Yeah, right. As if the Greeks hadn't dug their own grave with their utterly reckless, irresponsible actions that are now threatening to wreck the Eurozone!

But I have to concur with the core of Vaggelis's complaint: we're going to have to pay for the massive financial sins of our fathers, and our children will too.

The sheer finger-pointing acrimony of the Greek catastrophe (there's a good Greek word!), though, has been ludicrous on all sides, from Greeks bringing up the Nazis to Germans suggesting that Greece sell off some islands to pay off their debt.

So it seems that Milton Friedman was right when he predicted that the euro currency would not survive its first real recession.

At the New York Times, The Worm Turns

On the oil spill in the Gulf and on the GM bailout debacle and the lies that went with it, the worm turns. See too commentary here and here. Are folks at the Gray Lady finally remembering that journalism isn't the same as unbridled political cheerleading? Well, a girl can hope.

Nerd Analysis: Is Government-Subsidized Home Ownership Necessary to "Preserve Our National Identity"? Plus a Rant!

Say WHAT? Robert Shiller may be a Yale economist, but I think he's wrong about this whole home ownership and government subsidy business. Here's his New York Times op-ed, by the way, so you can read for yourself. Besides, government meddling helped create the housing bubble and resulting toxic mortgage mess.

Also, are we really saying that somehow home ownership is a prerequisite for a national identity/character? WHAT? What do you even mean by those words? Pffffft. I already figured out a while ago that in the government obsession with home ownership, even for people who shouldn't have gotten mortgages in the first place, the humble, taxpaying, fiscally responsible apartment renter (like yours truly and most of my hard-working friends) gets the shaft.

Shiller even concedes that government house-buying subsidies have very little economic justification (i.e., actual, practical, common-sense reasons for doing stuff), but he insists on the "social engineering" aspect. And so in the end he begins, most unfortunately, to sound like every other tiresome, ideologically-driven, pie-eyed dreamer with no grip on harsh pragmatic reality, justifying bad policy by claiming some kind of moral high ground and good intention. (Booooooo!)

You know, someday I'd like to buy a house (or a cute condo). But a house isn't the only kind of personal property that matters (and with the Kelo decision and eminent domain, you might still be out of luck with that -- oops, did I say that out loud? Ask some New Yorkers about their property rights). I think the entire idea that homeowning is somehow a requirement for good communities and individual liberties is flawed, and besides, it's reductionist and doesn't even try to account for the fact that people who don't own houses matter too (don't they?). I was in a towering rage about the mortgage mess, and I still am. Homeowning is not the end-all and be-all of life.

I find amusing also in the extreme Shiller's statement that renting puts us all under the "oppression of a landlord" and brings up nasty memories of tenements. REALLY? TENEMENTS? I'm looking around my apartment and out the window at the rest of the sunny complex right now. Hm, we haven't had a single cholera outbreak this month or last, actually. Not a single instance of typhoid or tuberculosis, no rats or vermin or filth or crime, no high-rise fires or leaky pipes, no instances of entire families crammed into a single room, no kids crying because they'd spent all day working in a mill for The Man!

Funny, I don't feel oppressed that I pay rent to someone. I don't feel like some kind of serf or peasant or whatever. In fact, I actually (gasp!) LIKE the fact that I pay my own rent with my own money for my own place to live that I chose. Funny, when I went apartment-hunting, the sheer awful, blood-sucking, soul-killing oppression of it all -- landlords and rent and tenements, oh my! -- never entered my head. I was more thinking, closet space and kitchen appliances and nice sunlight exposure so I can have a place to live and work hard and make my way in the world without depending on anyone other than myself, so I can keep chasing my American Dream. Well, I guess this just doesn't make me part of the community or national identity of people who care about individual liberties and property rights! After all, I'm just a poor sad tenement dweller crushed under the heel of some ruthless landlord. Or something. PFFFFFFT.

Euro Notes: Germany and the Greek Implosion

I can't help but feel for the Germans, who are not happy about being asked to bail out the financially feckless Greeks. The little image from a German publication is just icing on the cake.

Paraphrased quote of the day on the irresponsible Greeks and exasperated Germans: "To give more money to the Greeks would be akin to giving schnapps to an alcoholic, argued Frank Schaeffler, deputy finance spokesman for the Free Democrats, the junior partner in Germany’s governing coalition."

Oh, my. Of course, this is matched and very possibly surpassed by the Greek deputy prime minister Theodoros Pangalos recently slamming the Germans by talking about World War II and Nazis stealing Greek gold. *Sigh.* There should be a rule that in any discussion or debate, the first party to bring up "Nazis" automatically loses.