European Meltdown?

How did Europe get this crazy? I think it's because European governments have overstretched by trying to provide too much, so that when they attempt to provide the limited benefits that good government should accomplish, they fail. They've certainly conditioned many people to think that someone else is to blame for their various plights.

Because short selling of stocks can be mixed with the spreading of economic rumors and falsehoods, several nations in Europe are banning the spreading of rumors and falsehoo...oh, wait...they're banning short selling.  That doesn't seem to make sense.

“While short-selling can be a valid trading strategy, when used in combination with spreading false market rumors this is clearly abusive,” the European Securities and Markets Authority, which coordinates the work of national regulators in the 27-nation European Union, said in a statement after talks ended late yesterday. National regulators will impose the bans “to restrict the benefits that can be achieved from spreading false rumors or to achieve a regulatory level playing field.”

Banks’ overnight borrowings from the European Central Bank jumped to the highest in three months yesterday, a sign some lenders may have need for emergency cash.  

I think that laws punishing financial lying would probably work better.

In Britain, where cops seem to be disrespected because they don't carry guns, the Prime Minister is contemplating a Mubarak-style banning of social media, which has been used, unfortunately, to rally the looters.

David Cameron, the British prime minister, says curfew measures and restrictions on social media websites will be considered following days of rioting in London and other English towns and cities.

Cameron said authorities were looking at ways of stopping people communicating via social media websites if they were suspected of plotting "criminality and violence." He said face coverings could also be banned if criminality was suspected and said authorities were considering whether wider powers of curfew for police were necessary.

All because hordes of British commoners have been taught that when they don't have what they want, it is someone else's fault.Says pundit Ann Coulter:

Congratulations, Britain! You've barbarized your citizenry, without regard to race, gender or physical handicap!

With a welfare system far more advanced than the United States, the British have achieved the remarkable result of turning entire communities of ancestral British people into tattooed, drunken brutes.

I guess we now have the proof of what conservatives have been saying since forever: Looting is a result of liberal welfare policies. And Britain is in the end stages of the welfare state.

 Closer to the action, the Daily Mail agrees.. Max Hastings reminds us that during one of the largest riots in United States history-- Detroit 1967--most people didn't riot because they were angry, but instead because it was fun.

A few weeks after the U.S. city of Detroit was ravaged by 1967 race riots in which 43 people died, I was shown around the wrecked areas by a black  reporter named Joe Strickland.

He said: ‘Don’t you believe all that stuff people here are giving media folk about how sorry they are about what happened. When they talk to each other, they say: “It was a great fire, man!” ’

The same thing seems to be happening in Britain today.

I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today.

It was fun. It made life interesting. It got people to notice them. As a girl looter told a BBC reporter, it showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like’.

So much so that they are inviting their friends to come join in the celebration of debauchery.

It's a big mess, no doubt. Banning social media won't solve the problem, and it will just create another one--loss of liberty. The real solution is easy to see, although the cancer will be a nightmare to eradicate. The sooner government recognizes that it can't be the welfare dispenser to the world, the quicker we can get back to making healthy economies.  Government needs to begin asking people what they can do for their country rather than encouraging them to wonder what they can do to it.