The Service Economy
(Photo by Jeff Kubina) (CC BY) (Resized/Cropped)
I have visited and spent weeks at a time in Europe. On this recent trip however, something clicked for me as I stared out my hotel window at a train station and seeing other public mass transportation moving on the street. In Europe, I think that most people don’t have cars because they’re too expensive.
Then a friend in Vienna said 90% of the people get at least some welfare. I don’t know if this number is accurate, but the reality is surely very high. It’s socialism to a degree that is almost all-pervasive. My American friends should be aware: we are not even close to this (yet).
Europeans are aware that their administered economy isn’t vibrant or dynamic. They know it’s nothing like the US economy used to be, or even the way it is now.
And they’re OK with that.
It’s but a small price to pay, they think, to achieve the goal of everyone being taken care of. The planners of course enjoy the power over people’s lives, not to mention the endless opportunities for graft. The people, well, they are freed from responsibility to worry about the future. It’s all taken care of.
And then it hit me. What is the ideal for these people (not all Europeans, but the ones who love this system)?
They want a world in which the government services them. The government is supposed to feed, water, clothe, shelter, doctor, and move the people where they need to be.
It’s a view of man like livestock.
Keith Weiner is CEO of Monetary Metals, a precious metals fund company in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is a leading authority in the areas of gold, money, and credit and has made important contributions to the development of trading techniques founded upon the analysis of bid-ask spreads. He is founder of DiamondWare, a software company sold to Nortel in 2008, and founder of the Gold Standard Institute USA. Weiner attended university at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and earned his PhD at the (non-accredited) New Austrian School of Economics.
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