perfidy

No, this isn't that kind of post. No great danes, no leather, and get your filthy mind out of the gutter. Jerry over at Commonsense and Wonder links to an article in the Telegraph about a new book examining the root causes, if you will, of Germany's relative decline over the last few decades. Germany: Decline of a Superstar has become a bestseller in a Germany. Its author, Gabor Steingart, is a political journalist and Berlin bureau chief for the widely read newsmagazine Der Spiegel. So this criticism is not coming from the fringes.

"The GDP of both the British and French is higher than the Germans' and this is a shocking discovery for us. In the 1970s, Britain's GDP was only half of ours."

He is concerned that Germans are unwilling to confront the issue: "It has not been politically correct until now to admit that we're in decline, that the Deutschland Modell is the wrong one."

Mr Steingart says a key reason for the problems lie in what he calls his "core-crust" theory.

The "core" consists of the innovators, the producers and the service providers, while the "crust" are those who contribute nothing to the economy.

At present the crust consists of the two thirds of Germans who are not in work. Germany, the land that produced people such as Einstein and Daimler and inventions such as aspirin, has for the first time been having to buy patents from abroad because it is insufficiently inventive.

That is an incredible percentage - and looking at the demographics, it can only get worse as the German population gets increasingly concentrated in the upper age brackets. If we think we have a problem getting politicians to think about the Social Security and Medicare problems lurking in the not to distant future, its nothing compared to the problems that the Germans and other Europeans face.

"Since 1945 there has never been as small a core and as big a crust as there is today," Mr Steingart says.

According to the Federal Office of Statistics, the average German now spends only 13 per cent of his or her life in paid employment, while men devote 18 per cent to sport, television and visits to the pub and women 12 per cent to eating and personal hygiene. Britons work 250 hours more per year than Germans, Americans 350 hours more.

It is for this reason that Germany is haemorrhaging jobs abroad at a rate comparable with no other industrial land. According to the Institute for Economic Research around 2.6 million jobs have been relocated. This week it was announced that the electronics giant Siemens was on the verge of moving 10,000 jobs to eastern Europe.

Not to be all alarmist and everything, but unless the nations of Western Europe change their course, they could be laying the foundations for some truly bad times.

Just think - an aging population grasping desperately at welfare benefits that simply cannot be supported. Low and declining productivity, and a relative decline in power, prestige and international standing as a result of backward economic policies. A ready supply of foriegn scapegoats - however, the new potential scapegoats are not Jews eager to assimilate but intransigant and increasingly militant Muslims. A pan-European bureaucratic superstate being constructed; one that will write into its constitution the very welfare benefits that will destroy the European economy, that has little if any provision for individual rights, and will give power to unelected bureacrats who have a demonstrated desire to rule, rather than serve, the public.

If fundamental reforms aren't made, I don't see how the Europeans can avoid dire economic problems. And we know what happened last time Europe had a depression.