Merkel to Southern Europe: work more, play less

Workers in Southern Europe shouldn't enjoy more vacation and earlier retirement ages than their Northern European counterparts, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a meeting of her Christian Democratic Union party last night. The comments, highly surprising coming from this usually cautious and analytical politician, have been greeted by applause from the right-leaning papers in Germany today.

"People in countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal should not retire earlier than in Germany. We should all make the same efforts, this is important," German press agency DPA quotes Merkel as saying. "We cannot have a common currency where some get lots of vacation time and others very little. That won't work in the long term."

The notoriously early retirement ages in Southern Europe have been a cause of serious griping in Germany since the country was forced to foot most of the bill to bail out Greece and Portugal over the past year.  In Greece and Italy, a person can retire as early as 57. In Germany a person can't retire earlier than 65, and Merkel's government has voted to raise that to 67 over the next three years. Part of the conditions of Greece receiving its EU-IMF bailout was that it introduce reforms to raise the retirement age to 63.

Be careful what you wish for, teabaggers

The Tea Party movement in the United States saw its most high-profile electoral success last Tuesday with the primary election of Rand Paul, son of the notorious Texas Libertarian Ron Paul, to be the Republican candidate for Senator in Kentucky. The pundits told us it was a “victory over the Washington establishment” delivered by voters seething with anger. Paul’s mainstream Republican challenger had received the endorsement of long-serving Republican senators, while Paul had been endorsed by the Tea Party and Sarah Palin. “This is a message to Washington from the Tea Party!” shouted an elated Paul at his victory speech.

But it wasn’t long before the reality began to sink in about exactly who the teabaggers were pushing into power. Like his father, Paul is an adherent to a uniquely American brand of ultra-orthodox Libertarianism. This strain of thought opposes almost all government interference in people’s lives. It is opposed to income tax, the environmental protection agency, the FBI, the Americans with Disabilities Act, government pensions, medicare, you name it. If the government does it, they want it killed.

Lately this kind of non-government ideology has been gaining popularity amongst an increasingly radicalized American public. The Tea Party movement, born out of citizen anger over Barack Obama’s efforts to give all Americans health insurance, has morphed into a snowballing anti-government crusade that seems like it won’t be content until Washington has been burned to the ground. Spurred on by Fox News, the most watched news network in the US, the Teabaggers believe that the US government is “out of control”, developing into an authoritarian super-state that seeks to regulate every area of their lives.