Isegoria

In Europe, the financial crisis is reviving old memories — old, old memories:

“I haven’t forgotten history,” says Gert Heinz, a tax adviser in Munich. “If you depend on paper money you can lose everything. We’ve learned that the hard way after two world wars.”

So when Chancellor Angela Merkel went on television recently to tell Germans that their bank accounts were safe, Heinz, who at 68 still remembers the rows of canned food that his mother hoarded in the attic, decided he would rather be safe than sorry.

He converted another chunk of his savings into gold and stocked up on a six-month supply of rice, sugar, flour and a special brand of milk powder that lasts for half a century.

Heinz may be an extreme example, but he is not alone among Europeans who are looking for ways to protect themselves in the face of a financial storm that — at least so far — has affected them much less directly than it has many Americans. Indeed, his reaction reflects the history of a Continent that has weathered wars, revolutions and financial crises over the centuries, burnishing national convictions that are very different from those in the United States.

Only Europe would produce survivalists without guns.

More seriously, Europeans tend to have little or no money in their own stock markets:

In America, wealth and retirement savings are much more tied up in the stock market, with a majority of people owning at least a modest stake. By contrast, only 13 percent of German households and 24 percent of French ones own shares, according to 2006 figures compiled by the European Savings Institute. Pensions are still largely state-driven, not 401(k)-style investment accounts. Even for the British, who look more like Americans in terms of their credit card debt and mortgage exposure, the share of those who have invested in the market is only about 20 percent.

Russia's role in rescuing Iceland is apparently to drive the US and UK mad with jealousy:

When Iceland announced it was seeking a $6bn (£4bn) loan from Russia to help rescue its crisis-ravaged economy, some in the NATO alliance, of which Iceland is a member, took fright.

They suspected that Russia was acting to further its geopolitical interests in the region in the guise of a white knight.
[...]
For its part, Iceland said Russia was not its first choice for saviour – they had expected significant help from the US and the UK.

“Considering the fact that many of our friends were not willing to help us, we had to discuss [the loan] with Russia,” Prime Minister Geir Haarde told Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat.

Iceland took particular offence at Britain’s use of anti-terrorism legislation to freeze assets of banks operating in the UK.

As Gauti Kristmannsson, an associate professor of translation studies at the University of Iceland, put it, “We thought we had friends, in Europe and in the United States.”

“The disappointment with our old ‘friends’ is great,” he wrote in the New York Times.

Was the Sexual Revolution a Mistake? If you’re conservative, the answer’s obvious: Um, duh? Yes. If you’re liberal, the answer’s also obvious: What? Are you some kind of cave person? David Friedman isn’t really conservative or liberal though, so he he thinks it through. His introduction sets the tone:

One would expect the availability of reliable contraception and legal abortion to have sharply reduced the number of children born out of wedlock. In fact it was accompanied, in the U.S. and abroad, with a steep increase in that number. Correlation is not causation but it does raise the possibility of causation, especially when it goes in precisely the opposite of the predicted direction.

Who owns the West? The Federal government:

Alex Tabarrok argues that now is the time for the Buffalo Commons:

Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars — perhaps trillions of dollars — for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes. At the same time, a sale of western land would improve the efficiency of land allocation.
[...]
The government should sell some of its most valuable land in the west and use some of the proceeds to buy low-price land in the Great Plains.

The western Great Plains are emptying of people. Some 322 of the 443 Plains counties have lost population since 1930 and a majority have lost population since 1990.

Now is the time for the Federal government to sell high-priced land in the West, use some of the proceeds to deal with current problems and use some of the proceeds to buy low-priced land in the Plains creating the world’s largest nature park, The Buffalo Commons.