A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
If you have never read James Joyce's short story 'The Dead', let alone the collection Dubliners, from which it comes, you have much to look forward to. The work has a point and I happen to think that the point is pernicious; however, the execution is superbly beautiful and penetrating. I haven't given much away by giving you the punch line.
The newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. Snow here is a metaphor for spiritual numbness, all direct contact with reality and life is muffled.
Joyce's words came to mind when I read an excellent account of the fiscal crisis in Europe. The government of Portugal fell in late March when Parliament refused to support Prime Minister Jose Socrates' austerity plan. Portugal now joins Ireland and Greece in the cue for an EU bailout.
In 'Original Sin', in Foreign Policy, Wolfgang Münchau explains the root cause of the European crisis, which is moral more than anything else.
The European debt crisis -- which saw its latest iteration inaugurated on Wednesday, April 6, when Portugal indicated it would request an EU bailout -- has exposed every single lie, every fudge, and every political, legal, and economic loophole that went into making the continent's common currency. One reason Europeans have yet to set the euro right is that they still haven't reckoned with the extent of bad faith that went into its creation.
To sell the euro to a diverse populace back in the 1990s, its advocates made a series of mostly inconstant promises. The Germans were promised that monetary union would not give rise to fiscal transfers, and would create a currency at least as stable as the Deutschmark. The French understood the euro as a vehicle for improved domestic competitiveness and global reach. For the Italians and the Spanish, it offered an opportunity for monetary stability and permanently low interest rates. And in countries with highly deregulated banking systems, such as Spain and Ireland, it brought the prospect of sudden wealth.
The root cause of the crisis is bad faith. This is not quite the same thing as lying, but it is damn near. The Eurocrats believed deeply in the cause of economic and political union. To sell the idea of a common currency, they made a lot of practically and perhaps logically irreconcilable promises to Europe's various peoples and governments. Some of the Eurocrats may have known full well that they were lying through their teeth. Most of them, I suspect, simply resisted ever thinking through their promises to the logical conclusions. That is how bad faith often works.
Now that a debt crisis has put severe pressure on the Euro, it is becoming clear that the irreconcilable promises cannot be reconciled. I highly recommend the entire essay. For one thing, it seems clear that the U.S. bank bailout was the right policy. Chalk up one for Obama/Bush.
Bad faith is at work across the developed world and has been busy for decades in the U.S. Many state governments are in fiscal crisis because of promises made that were not plausible when they were made. On the federal level, the same is true for Social Security and much truer for Medicare and Medicaid.
Perhaps the best example of bad faith was President Obama's early decision to sell health care reform as an instrument to reign in the growth of health care cost and thus to help balance the budget. We were going to extend guaranteed health insurance to tens of millions of people, without raising costs to individuals. This could be done without limiting choices. The President promised that he would veto the bill if added one dime to the deficit, and he promised that "if you like your health care plan you can keep it."
Was the President lying? Maybe. I expect he just neglected to think these things through. That's bad faith.
The snow has been general over all of Ireland, and Portugal, and the European Community, and California, and the rest of the United States.
Currently, the cost of health care is rising at a much higher rate than inflation. Even if we were to implement your beloved single payer, at a certain point we can not afford to pay for every new treatment and technology that comes along if we want to have any semblance of an economy. If you dont have insurance you should check out "Penny Health Insurance" for information on how to get one.
Posted by: pennyfraser | Saturday, April 09, 2011 at 02:30 AM