Yet Another European Crisis By Richard Miller

     What has Europe done to deserve such rapid destruction, coming unstuck on all fronts?
  https://www.barrons.com/articles/europe-economic-crisis-is-coming-51545951011?

     Oh, I found a neat summary of this tale of economic woe to make life easier for our long-suffering eyes:

“Summary: Europe faces a huge future recession not because of intermediate factors like falling imports, but because its consumer spending is falling. The “yellow vests” could not wish for a better exoneration: the regulatory, class warfare based tax-and-spend welfare state ran out of money to steal from the wealthy alone, and so has begun to take from the middle class in order to support its diversity underclass (mostly Roma/Pakistanis, Muslims, Africans, Turks, Eastern Europeans). This means that people have less money and their daily expenses are higher, which drives down consumption. It took a few decades to see the results, but now we are at the point where government has dried up the well of its own citizens, who are most likely supplementing their purchases with more barter, gardening, and under-the-table cash jobs in order to avoid the dying economy.

Just as in the Soviet Union, where people turned first to the black market or trades with neighbors, people in the West now know that the big shiny box stores belong to the very wealthy and the diversity underclass which has redistributed money to spend in them. It turns out that, much like both totalitarianism and democracy reveal a common principle in Crowdism, both Communism and Keynesian entitlements-based social democracies share a similar central theory in the idea of class warfare driven tax-and-spend welfare states, and that not surprisingly, they fail the same way. The coming European economic burnout will parallel the downfall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, paving the way for its eventual capitulation.”
http://www.amerika.org/politics/periscope-december-29-2018/

     The same forces that are now destroying Western Europe, and leading to the desperate protests by the French “deplorables” in the yellow vest movement will also hit sleepy Australia in the near future. It will be interesting to see how the land of the long weekend responds to the removal of the hedonism which has kept the population dumb and docile for so long.