Philippe Legrain on Dutch hypocritical TV

Philippe Legrain (1973) is a British economist who worked as an advisor for former communist and later EU commission president José Manuel Durão Barroso in 2011-2014. Legrain has now written a book on a European Spring, something that Manny tried hard to achieve, as readers of this weblog know, as I tried to advise Manny too.

The real news from Brussels is that Manny’s successor Jean-Claude Juncker doesn’t want a Spring but a Hot Summer. A showdown with Putin should unite the peoples of the EU, and also force Greece to choose sides, JCJ thinks.  Philippe Legrain’s book is old hat. I am still waiting for approval by JCJ to spill some of the beans of our luncheons, dinner parties and fire-side chats. The big secret in Europe is that Angela, François, Jean-Claude and me were all born in 1954, and that we share an obligation to make it all work, though I am for peace-with-strength and they are hopelessly confused.

This Sunday, Philippe Legrain allowed Dutch television to interview him on his Spring eulogy. Legrain is unaware that Dutch TV journalists are hypocrites by profession, and that he is sucked dry like in those vampire movies.

The interview is in English with Dutch undertitles, and you can check how interviewer Marcia Luyten (1971) takes Legrain for a walk in the woods, guts him, and leaves his body somewhere in a ditch.

About a key moment in the economic crisis:

“There was a panic across the Eurozone, and people thought that governments could not pay their debts. And actually it was a panic that ultimately the ECB was able to solve. In the case of the Netherlands it wasn’t even a panic. This was just a mistake made by this government, under pressure from Brussels, and Berlin.” (Philippe Legrain, minute 35).

It is absurd to portray Holland as a victim of Brussels. It is the other way around. Europe is a victim of Holland:

• It were rather speculators who saw an opportunity to make a killing. It wasn’t a panic but a real threat, caused by wrong legal rules.
• The solution provided by the ECB still is an improvisation, and we still need a new treaty, see my piece on the two Mario’s.
• It were Dutch hawks who joined with Germany and imposed austerity on the rest of Europe, also using Brussels as a front for the Dutch electorate.

Other major errors in the interview are:

• Legrain apparently never really studied Holland. For him it is a small country that falls under his radar. For hm, Holland is not a perpetrator but a victim. For him, these are nice people, and not hypocrites. Apparently he regards Holland as a free, tolerant, open-minded country, that just happens to have made some policy errors, without kids delving into the trash as now happens in Greece. He can’t make himself see Marcia Luyten as co-responsible for making kids in Greece do so. But she is a hypocrite and co-responsible. She never properly informed the Dutch viewers.
• Legrain just answers the questions that Marcia asks. He doesn’t expose Holland as a major perpetrator. He does not expose Marcia as belonging to the hypocrites who helped cause the problems. He joins Marcia in her “frame” that it are politicians who do not want to lose face, while a major part of the story is that it are journalists who have been misreporting and misrepresenting.
• Legrain doesn’t expose Jeroen Dijsselbloem as a major stumbling block: an agricultural economist who got into politics too quickly and who apparently isn’t able to deal with these issues properly. (Dijsselbloem already failed on the policy w.r.t. the education on mathematics.) (See Dijsselbloem on Dutch exports.)

Marcia Luyten reads the English book title “European Spring”, by Philippe Legrain (minutes 22-40)

Thus, Philippe, the next time that you visit Holland, first consider my books DRGTPE and CSBH, and let us discuss those, before you face Dutch journalism.

Incidently, we appear to agree with a lot. For example, that the surplus on the Dutch or German exports account was invested abroad, and basically was squandered when investments failed, is a key feature in my analysis since 1990. See also Johannes Witteveen, a former executive director of the IMF.  But the hypocrites on Dutch television will not allow viewers to hear this from home grown economists. They will welcome people like you, Philippe, who criticize Germany and France, instead of the local Dutch incrowd hawks and perpetrators, and their messenger prime minister Mark Rutte, who has a degree in history and who does not know much about economics but still is zealot about Margaret Thatcher, and who got the Rathenau prize on freedom while he censors economic science in Holland.

But, you also state that you have a proposal how a currency union would work with decentralised decision making. I wonder how you could achieve that. My suggestion has been that each nation adopts an Economic Supreme Court. I wonder whether your ideas are the same. Apparently those are behind a pay wall. This will not work.  Even a crisis should not force people to buy into books that might be scientifically unwarranted.

PM. This hypocritical Buitenhof TV broadcast also contains a discussion with Nikos Koulousios, six minutes before Philippe Legrain. This is somewhat amusing, but not really so.

• The suggestion is that when Greece and Germany collaborate on jokes, and the Germans admit that they don’t have a sense of humour, then we see a proper collaboration in Europe: and all is fine, and people should feel satisfied that the notion of a unified Europe might work. I am afraid that this only confirms national stereotypes and isn’t real humour.
• Koulousios calls it typical that a letter signed by economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty did appear in the Greek paper efsyn.gr but not in other papers, except in the Financial Times in which it appeared originally. He seems to suggest some kind of conspiracy, in which the Greek readership is manipulated and not given the right information. However, it may just be that the FT expects royalties. Check why I don’t blog at the FT. Thus the proper diagnosis is that journalists can be quite hypocritical, not only in Holland but even in Greece.

There is one real conclusion from all this. I will discuss it with JCJ the next time I see him. Rather than joining Putin in a hot Summer war on the Ukraine, the EU should pay Russian journalists more money for accurate reporting about the state of the world.

Shutdown of Europe

This afternoon I had an extended lunch in Brussels with José Manuel Durão Barroso, chairman of the European Commission. We were barely seated and he already started complaining: “Why can’t I have a government shutdown like Obama ?”

I had suggested a simple menu since I didn’t want him distracted by the finer peaks of gastronomy that he is accustomed to. The simplicity appealed to him and he ate and complained with gusto.

His jealousy of Obama was right there at the entrée of a simple Caesar salad, came to full blossom over the tournedos, and didn’t subside at the dame blanche. Like our dishes, Manny (for friends) went from green to red and ended up both steaming black on the outside while icy white at his core.

By “Obama” he meant the USA and by “I” he meant Europe.

Manny didn’t use the “we”, which is significant since Manny is only a chairman who changed his title into “president”, and he has to share his power with the EU Council president Herman van Rompuy who was a “president” right from the start. These two EU presidents treat each other as figureheads while Eurozone president Jeroen Dijsselbloem is the odd man out and only a trainee for figurehead.

“America is a real democracy,” Manny argued. “When there is no money the government simply shuts down. Tit for tat. This is as it should be ! The voters learn that they better pay more taxes. Even a child can understand it. When a child can understand it, you get a grown-up democracy.”

“So why don’t you shut down Europe ?” I asked.

“I have the deficit. It is a horrible thing, you know. You cannot do anything since there is always the deficit. If you lower taxes then the deficit grows big and angry. If you raise taxes then you hurt its self-respect and it becomes even angrier. If one country has something expensive then another country wants something expensive too, and to keep peace everyone agrees that the deficit will take care of it, and then I have to go out and tell the deficit, which makes it angry again. I hate the deficit. I would like to get rid of it but I can’t find a way to do so. It is like Switzerland, stuck right in the middle of the EU but no part of it, like a big hole in the eye.”

“Besides,” Manny continued, “who would notice a shutdown of Europe ?”

“If I would send the EU bureaucrats on unpaid leave, establishments in Brussels like our restaurant would notice but that’s about it.”

“Last September I had my State of the Union, with a campaign for greater unity in Europe, and nobody noticed. Surely people will not notice a Government Shutdown either. If I open or close my mouth it has no effect, except when I am eating.”

“The EU hasn’t had an Emergency Top Crisis Meeting for a whole year now. Europe doesn’t seem to exist,” I agreed.

“We have been dead since August 2012, ever since Mario Monti of the European Central Bank said that he would print as much money as the deficit requires,” Manny growled, cutting and cutting his tournedos in ever smaller pieces.

Manny wasn’t a person for accuracy. “You mean Mario Draghi,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Whatever Mario,” he reacted. “Though I now understand why that Monti guy was surprised when I gave him the cold shoulder lately. Politicians should have different names. Italians can do it with their pizzas so why not in politics ?”

“I hate to mention it,” I continued, “but Obama has a deficit too.”

“But he doesn’t have a Mario,” Manny retorted, lavishly pouring hot chocolate. “His deficit gets a real punch in the face right now, with his government shutdown. There is no Mario to undercut him. All national museums and wildparks are closed. No more “thank you for your mail” letters from the White House. No more tax officials checking your tax statement. Americans are bleeding.”

“I instead do not only have a deficit but also a Mario who is married to it. Europe suffers from a weak democracy in which there will always be a tax official who checks our statement.”

“I can only hope that Angela Merkel makes a coalition soon so that she can start a whole new series of Emergency Top Crisis Meetings again. The Greeks are sending desperate emails that they are strictly obeying the agreements and aren’t hiding their deficit, which is flagging to me that they want to be caught red-handed guilty again. I am pretty sure that my Mario has no good answer for the Greeks, that will take that smug smile from his face.”

At the end of our lunch, Manny was still frustrated on his campaign on unity in Europe and still glaringly jealous of Obama with his United States but I shared his expectation of good times ahead. “I just discovered a good restaurant in Waterloo. Shall we go there next time ?”

Thermometer

The President of the EU Commission José Barroso states:

“I regard Holland already for years as a guiding country, as the political thermometer of Europe. You saw that in the tolerance of softdrugs, the gay marriage, the debate on euthanasia, but also in the rise of the new right-wing extremism of Pim Fortuyn. Holland with its deep-rooted democratic tradition has shaken off political correctness earlier than other countries. Therefor I am alert on what is happening in Holland, that often forecasts the trend in the rest of Europe.” (Interview with de Volkskrant September 22, V10)

(1) Fortuyn wasn’t quite right-wing. We already had Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Jörg Haider in Austria and Umberto Bossi in Italy. What happened is that 9/11 caused a mood swing all over the world, and Fortuyn with his own agenda took advantage of the surf. When outsiders misread what is happening in Holland does not make it a good thermometer. (Even apart from that correlation isn’t cause.)

(2) The tolerance for softdrugs is much of a disaster. Personal possession of a small quantity is tolerated but coffee shops cannot legally buy from suppliers. This causes an underground criminal and violent economy. It is an inane approach that blocks the real solution of bringing drugs into the law all over the world. Blast Holland instead of sending your youngsters to Amsterdam to have their high.

(3) One kind of political correctness merely replaces another kind. It may be doubted whether it is possible to shake off political correctness per se. The criterion lies rather in the respect shown for differing opinions.

(4) It must be hoped that the censorship of science that now lasts in Holland for 23 years does not cause a trend in Europe. That nice journalist of de Volkskrant who had the interview with Barroso doesn’t report about the censorship of science by the directorate of the Dutch Central Planning Bureau either. Perhaps Barroso has indeed taken Holland as a guide here, and Europe now gets the same treatment from Brussels ? What secrets are lurking there that we do not hear about ? Well, no need for paranoia, but it is a useful observation that the EU doesn’t have an Economic Supreme Court of itself (that might co-ordinate the national ESCs) – and check out the scientific conditions in the appendix of DRGTPE.

(5) Boycotting a EU country that censors science would be a good trend though. Start with Holland.