Europe has been gripped by a passionate infatuation with technocrats. They are the ones! Only they can run the show! Politicians are no good. Well nor is democracy for that matter, but we can’t say that out loud. Now, we just push the technocrats to the fore and push the politicians out by default (excuse the pun).

But what is a technocrat? Usually an economist. Usually one that is imbued with Chicago School Free Market Economic Dogma. Usually someone highly overpaid and inevitably someone who has come to believe he can play at being God.

And what do technocrats do? Oh well, apart from ordering the tide to stop like King Canute*, they crunch the numbers, reduce everything to models that have no relation to reality, have a corner grocer’s book keeping mentality and totally forget that the Economy is anything to do with the welfare of the people. Well, welfare is bad in itself anyway and People are only impersonal statistics and therefore expendable.

The Technocrats, with the IMF ones being the leading lights, have decided that Europe’s problem is one of competitiveness. Which is supposed to mean that it is more expensive to make a car, say, in Greece than it is in Germany. To this end, therefore, unit labour costs must be slashed in Greece. A unit labour cost is not however the nominal wage, but a measure of productivity. That is, if your wage in Greece is one tenth of what it is in Germany, but you only have a spade to dig a hole with, whereas the German worker has a high power drill, you are going to need say twelve times the time to dig the hole than in Germany, therefore making the job more expensive.

Now, to any normal mind (but not that of a technocrat!) it would mean that to improve productivity you should invest in better equipment, smoother functioning of the economy, more streamlining, and things like that. No reduction in wages? Well we can’t rule that out completely of course, but for the technocrats it is the ONLY thing that needs to be done. They do not even want to consider that in itself and exclusive of all other measures it cannot achieve anything much.

The whole of the Brutal German inspired European Austerity program has been based on just such a premise. Slash wages, increase working hours, deprive workers of all rights and there you are! The country you are doing all this to will now become competitive!

And here is where the brilliance of the technocrats comes in. First of all they draw up plans and set targets based on various numbers they crunch. These numbers never take the real world into account nor the side effects of their brilliant measures for achieving targets. Now, when the forecasts inevitably go wrong, as they always do precisely because they are not based on the real situation and all the facts, do they correct?

No! They are never wrong! It is always the fault of others, for not doing precisely as they were told. So what happens? More of the destructive measures to meet these unrealistic targets are piled on, in order to reach the unrealistic targets in the first place. Now this could be quite amusing and a source for the best satirical shows on TV, if it did not lead to the ruin of so many lives.

This is where playing God comes in. What is Europe’s problem? Uncompetitiveness between the regions. How to solve it? Well in times gone by devaluations used to do this quite well. But now we have the Euro! It is is sacrosanct. The Greek PM (and not only him), agrees (without even knowing why he does) that the Euro at all costs! This is what the technocrats believe too. So what to do?

Well, simple really. If we force wages and income down and raise taxes, thereby depriving citizens of just about everything they thought they had, then in say ten years time we will have repaired the imbalances and all will have been adjusted. This is social engineering at its rawest and most inhuman.

I have used two words in the previous paragraph, “citizen” and “inhuman”, both words that have no meaning for technocrats, who are now playing God. Citizen? No such thing. They should just shut up and do as they are told because we are the ones who know better and we have devised a plan to save the Eurozone. Inhuman? Now what’s that supposed to mean? Don’t give me this hunger nonsense and suicides and pauperization. None of that enters the equation.

The only thing that matters is the Economy, the Economy as an abstract of course. The Banks must get re capitalized, but at the expense of the people. So once we have turned all this around, in a couple of decades things will be operating smoothly again. No we cannot borrow for growth (which would be the way to restore competitiveness) and we cannot waste precious money on welfare and healthcare etc. All that is counter productive anyway.

Now the trouble with these God technocrats high up on Mount Sinai, is that apart from not giving a damn about the consequences, they also get their plans all wrong in the first place. They are so high up and removed from what is going on on the ground, they are so wrapped up in the clouds of their own warped, erroneous and bigoted theories, that not only do they refuse to admit they could have been wrong, but they refuse even to see how they have gone wrong.

And they do not even see this because, for them, people are nothing more than specs of insignificant dust that should be brushed away. Everything has become dehumanised for them. They are just doing their job.

Much the same way as the various German state employees were doing theirs at Dachau and Belsen say. They just could not see what they were actually doing and remained convinced that they were right.

 

*King Canute: a legendary King of England who thought he was so powerful he could order the tide to stop, only failed miserably when he tried to do so.