Growth is a priority in eurozone, say leaders … France and Germany have said boosting economic growth across Europe was a priority in efforts to stem the debt crisis showing signs of spreading across the 17 euro currency countries. After a Berlin meeting with French President Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Greece and its private creditors to agree to the restructuring of the country's national debt if it is to receive its next batch of bailout cash. In October the eurozone agreed a second handout for Greece that involves the country's private creditors accepting a 50% reduction in the value of their holdings of Greek debt. She added that both she and Mr Sarkozy want Greece to receive the money. "We want for Greece to remain in the eurozone," she said. – UK Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: Nothing else can act as an engine of job growth more effectively than big government.
Free-Market Analysis: Thank goodness Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Nicolas Sarkozy have agreed to save the Western world by creating more jobs. Unemployment is anathema to them and now they have vowed to provide people in Europe with the work they need. They also want Greece to stay in the Eurozone.
OK, sarcasm off. This is surely a power elite dominant social theme, that government can "create" jobs. Actually, what government can create is sinecures. And it can only offer a benign business environment once it has taken steps to ruin what is already in place.
The marketplace creates jobs that actually add value. And if government can claim to create jobs it is only by reducing taxes, regulation or price inflation in such a way as to allow the private market itself to operate more efficiently.
Nonetheless, this doesn't stop politicians from claiming to create jobs, nor does it stop the bought-and-paid-for media from parroting the claim without ever investigating it. In the American presidential campaign this has become a big issue, with Mitt Romney trumpeting his job creation stats while others question them.
But the larger issue of government job-genesis goes unquestioned, except by the alternative 'Net media, which is where the task of real journalism now takes place. The Internet Reformation itself (as we have called it) continues to speak truth to power, though these days the "truth" is apt to be found electronically rather than on the printed page.
The same thing has just happened in Europe. Sarkozy and Merkel emerged from a meeting of some kind proclaiming that jobs are their priority. US President Barack Obama has said the same thing. Good. Let them explain how they will exercise this priority.
The only way they can justify their outlandish claims is by explaining they will reduce something that government has already put in place or by taking funds and aiming at certain industries and individuals. If this latter alternative is what they have in mind, then they are not "creating" jobs so much as transferring wealth from those who gathered it initially and providing it to those who did not and may not know how to utilize it.
That's all, folks. No other way to "grow" the economy. Either reduce the damage that government has already done or redirect wealth from the industrious among us to the less industrious.
There is, some might argue, one more way that government can create wealth and that is via the military. But in our view, that doesn't count. Destroying stuff is not a very cost-effective way of upping employment.
Besides, the government collects tax dollars in order to support the soldiers it hires. Thus revenue is merely redirected from the civilian population to the military establishment. Sounds more like a tithe than anything else. Here's some more from the article:
Germany has insisted on austerity measures in the so-called eurozone's fight to lower budget deficits and regain investor confidence. Europe is working to hammer out a new treaty enshrining tougher fiscal rules, which leaders agreed at a summit in early December.
Mrs Merkel added that resolving the crisis will be "step-by-step … there's no single- dimension solution". They also said that Europe should compare countries' labour market practices and learn from the best, and for European funds to be used to create jobs.
France and Germany are working to draw up new budget and fiscal guidelines by March to contain a debt crisis threatening to engulf the eurozone. Greece, whose sovereign debt problems sparked the current crisis, is struggling to impose austerity measures needed to secure a second bailout to ensure that it does not default.
We can see in this excerpt an elaboration of the "government can create jobs" meme. In this case, Merkel and Sarkozy are cast as sympathetic supporters of Greece and the struggles of the Greeks to survive an almost totally collapsed economy.
The reason the Greek economy collapsed was because the Greeks were subjected to an intense propaganda campaign to join the "new" EU and participate in the profitable spoils that the euro would provide.
The idea was not lost on canny Greeks that their borrowing power would go up if they were perceived as part of a mighty industrial machine led by the German business dynamo itself. And thus, the pact with the Devil was made.
As canny as Greeks are, the Eurocrats and bankers – and the great central banking families they apparently report to – are cannier. They not only inveigled the Greeks into the EU but the Irish and numerous Eastern European countries as well.
The proximate cause of this Euromania was the elite's affection for what the Eurocrats were offering. In every case, it seems, the invited states were made aware that various funding was available to stabilize questionable economies.
This was nothing, in retrospect, but a bribe. The top elites of each country received billions of euros to "rationalize" their economies in order to make them competitive with Northern European economies.
The elites of these Southern economies did exactly what was expected. They campaigned hard to ensure their countries joined the EU and they took the pro-offered money and pocketed it, leaving behind only a string of cooked books.
Today, Southern European taxpayers will pay for the riches their elites pocketed. And it is left to Merkel and Sarkozy themselves to prattle on about austerity and how the Greeks and citizens of other "profligate" countries will have to partake of "austerity" as they slowly realize the error of their ways and scratch their way back to prosperity again.
This bait-and-switch is no better than the "jobs" meme itself. Nothing is what it seems when it comes to international finance and the relative health of economies. The only constant is the power elite itself and the necessity that it sees in creating world government.
Everything is to be sacrificed to the New World Order – and mostly the truth. The Anglosphere power elite behind this nonsense NEEDS government to continue forcing the world toward centralization. It does so via mercantilism, controlling the government behind the scenes.
If government is seen as ineffective – let alone useless – then the elite's main levers of control shall be rendered ineffective. Thus the tremendous emphasis via agents like Sarkozy and Merkel to ensure that governments' ability to create prosperity remains unquestioned, at least according to the mainstream media that the elites own.
Government, in fact, cannot create a thing. It does not keep the peace. (It is an engine of war). It does not initiate justice. (It is a purveyor of murderous injustice). It certainly does not create prosperity. (It is a producer of inflation, taxes and regulatory ruin).
Merkel and Sarkozy may sing the same tune when it comes to celebrating the prosperity that government provides. The EU itself tells another, sorrier, tale.