Quick Analysis: EU Personal Bailout Plan Grants For Individuals and SMEs - Partial Texts of Economist assessments

The recently announced EU Personal Bailout Grant for individuals has received rave reviews from some of the world's most respected economists. Following are some of the comments being made. I'll start the list with the most notable one so far made by Economist

"the smartest move ever made in the history of modern macro-economics"

"Micro propping of macro-economic structures via a bailout grants is the fastest path to a domino effect and is a very ingenious way of controlling the credit crunch."

"The grant is a bold step that shifts focus from the big guys to the little guys. 20 years ago such a move would have been seen as downright crazy but today it may just be the tonic that the world needs"


"Europeans must have very brilliant economists to have been able to come up with this idea...a sure recipe for success"



So who's against the Bailout?

EU release details of the personal bailout plan grants

From CNN:

PARIS: Further details of the personal bailout plan approved by European Union leaders in Brussels on Wednesday has been released at a press conference in Paris. In its statement, the Union elaborated on the modus operandi for the selection of awardees, processing of grants and execution of projects.
According to the statement read by EU Commission spokesman Johannes Laitenberger "All awardees will be selected randomly from the EU world database. This database contains some 500 million email addresses of individuals from 96 countries."

"When this selection has been made, the recipients shall be informed through electronic mail and will then be provided with a questionnaire to answer. The purpose of the questionnaire is to enable the processing agent tailor the grant to suit the needs of the recipient's local economy. For optimal speed and greater security, communications during the processing of the grant will be done via electronic mail"

"All grant recipients will go through a preliminary identity verification to be carried out by EU officials after which they will be issued with an Authority to Claim and then handed over to 3rd party EU appointed strategic partners who will complete the processing of grants on a regional basis."
"The grants will be processed very fast because it is essential that the funds get to the recipients quickly so that they can start paying up the loans. Timing is of the greatest essence therefore and delays must be minimized. One of the strategies we will employ to expedite the process is to cancel and re-award any grant where the recipient wastes too much time."

The statement also hinted that recipients may be required to meet certain financial requirements before having their grants processed and that any grant which is not processed by the recipient within the stipulated time will be cancelled and re-awarded to another person drawn from a waiting list.
However in answer to reporters' questions, the spokesman noted that all grant recipients will be processed on a case-by-case basis and that some requirements may be waved depending on the particular case or the region in which the recipient lives.

The Personal Bailout Grant is an EU strategy to combat the crumbling financial markets of the world by giving out grants to individuals so that they can pay back their personal debts and also set up business enterprises. The aim of the grant is to shore up liquidity and cash flow in local economies and has been widely acclaimed as a "smart move".


COMMENT: Tis about damn time the government start looking out for the masses and tax payers instead of ploughing their money into schemes that will save only the big companies who are the cause of the global crisis in the first place. kudos to the European union, hope other governments (like the USA) will follow suit with similar plans.

No Country for Free Men

Rick Fisk wrote an article entitled No Country for Free Men for LewRockwell.com which rationally examines the debacle in Texas in which state authorities removed several hundred children from a Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints ranch where a few polygamist men lived with their many wives. The details of the story are explained as needed in the article, and if you’re really interested, I’m sure that Google News will yield further details.

Apparently, the FLDS skirts anti-polygamy laws by not actually getting marriage licenses for each wife. It’s a loophole that probably won’t and arguably shouldn’t be closed (my views on the relationship between marriage and the legal system are very different from most peoples, but are irrelevant to this discussion). However, the part of the system which the FLDS exploits, as Fisk points out, is the welfare system.

The state may not recognize unlicensed marriage, but they also have no legitimate legal authority to turn a religious institution into a “legal” institution. However, the FLDS goes a step further by having the “unwed” mothers apply for state welfare. They don’t just want to live their lifestyle in peace, they want to have the people of the State of Texas pay so that they can afford to maintain so many wives and children.

We “normal” folks may not agree with polygamy, even though our species—and most mammalian species—is polygynous. It’s a religious belief, as well as a socioeconomic belief. However, it’s practiced in other parts of the world without incident, so it’s not inherently a bad thing.

However, relying on welfare; relying on others to allow you to live your life your way is wrong.

When you step back and examine what is going on in this case, you can see that we are being conditioned into believing that the rights enumerated in our constitutions are not inviolate as is stated, but totally irrelevant if the state merely acts as if it has authority.

Government invading our lives, you say?

And finally, Texas’ taxpayers get to foot the bill for the hundreds of lawyers who will descend on the courtroom at their expense to “advocate” for the children – as it is called in CPS administrative court parlance. I don’t know if anyone has bothered to tally up what this may cost the taxpayers but it could easily reach 8 figures by the time everything is said and done. And not one of those state-paid lawyers will be arguing that the State’s action is constitutionally unjust. Quite the contrary. They’ll be counseling their “clients” to cooperate and make it easy on everyone.

Please read the full article, No Country for Free Men. I’ve been waiting for an enlightened view of the situation, such as that article, before chipping in my two cents.

Keeping the mind and govt open

A government can never truly be open source, at least realistically. There will always be secrets; unpublished code, per say. These secrets are matters of national defense: military operations during a time of declared war, location of the president and vice president so the two are rarely together (for obvious reasons).

However, most of the goings-on of the government should be open. Obama pushes for “open government.” Ron Paul pushes for less government and, presumably, open government, since there would be far less government to hide!

However, open source projects thrive on the involvement of the people. Our current election system does not encourage responsible voting. Take, for example, Pennsylvania’s primary election results. 90,836 PA Republicans voted for Mike Huckabee, who dropped out of the race March 4, 49 days prior to the election. This is like allowing all of the Linux users in PA, regardless of technical knowledge, vote on the addition of one of three kernel features, and giving them only the name of the feature—no description, background, author, codebase, language, performance evaluation, or source! Even more appropriate would be that the developer of the feature conceded that one of the other two features is more efficient and worthwhile than his own!

I’m not saying that only those in-the-know should be allowed the vote. Mistaking my words for that would be fallacious. I believe that every person deserves the right to vote. I believe that every person has the right to have evidence of their vote. I believe that every person has the right to request vote totals for every level of complexity in the elections system: precinct, county, congressional district, state, and federal.

As versatile and open as the Constitution may be—and yes, I believe that it may need some updating to reinforce personal liberty and states’ rights—the government and governance which exists now cannot be patched.

When working on a project, a developer comes to a point where he or she realizes that there is a major defect in the software. He or she (for sake of my fingers, I’m going to use he henceforth, pardon my faux pas) has two options: patch or rewrite. He knows there are serious bugs, bugs which are inherent in the design of the code, as it has been patched since it was written. These most of these patches were good things, but some introduced more bugs which have yet to be fixed.

Should the developer continue to patch the code? Or should he rewrite it, integrating the features of the old version with more manageable code and lessons learned since it was first written?

If he continues to patch it, he treats the problem, but may not actually fix the problem. The problem might be inherent, or the problem may be caused by a combination of other features.

If he rewrites it, he’ll spend a lot of time redoing work he’s already done, but the result will be a more efficient program with fewer bugs (hopefully) and more manageable, cohesive code base. Of course, this new version will have its bugs, too, but they may be easier to find if the code is more manageable.

What the United States needs is a rewrite. The foundations of our government are solid: the Constitution, capitalism and free market economy, liberty for all. These are like the basic functions that make a program tick, “the algorithm,” per say. There are other parts that work, too. However, the maintainers of our government have diverted our attention from the core of the government, preferring us to view the only the parts it wants us to see, i.e. the bling.

The founders—the original authors of the U.S. base code—have long since gone, and they would be disgusted by the mess that is the program and its code base—the federal government—today. Things aren’t going they way that they would have wanted, and there’s a growing part of the population which seeks to return the these ideas, to a set of ideas not much different in theory from the software philosophy of “do one thing and do it well.” The government is bloated, more bloated than any application to which I might possibly compare it.

The founders outlined in the Constitution—a white paper or base algorithm, if you prefer to keep up the programming analogies—the specific functions of the U.S. government. It outlined a process by which the white paper or algorithm itself could be changed to allow more functions or remove functions which endangered the users and their data. However, rather than use this process, the maintainers simply implement functions or remove functions without regard to the users’ opinions, data, or the fact that the users are supporting the maintainers financially.

A fork is nearly impossible. There is no more undiscovered land on the face of the Earth, and it would be difficult for a state to secede. It would be economically infeasible, as well as diplomatically infeasible. The citizens of the new country would have their rights and their government as the Constitution of the U.S.—and of their new country—defines, but they would not have the resources to be self-sufficient, and things imported would cost more.

Fortunately, our government is not setup like the Linux kernel maintenance group in that The President of the United States is not a benevolent dictator (at least not on paper, haha). There are, however, 50 branches of the U.S. kernel which all have their own quirks and maintainers. Like a few projects, perhaps the Debian project included, the U.S. government does have representatives, people who supposedly represent their constituents in the decision-making process having been chosen by those constituents.

The ears of the maintainer are closed. He doesn’t want hear from the users; the people. However, the representatives’ ears are open, and they must be, by definition. In order to change the course of the program; the United States, we, as users; citizens, must elect representatives who believe as we do and not settle for anyone lesser. These representatives will then make the decisions we would make if we were in their position, leading to a program which is more useful, usable, smaller, and most of all, open.