In many ways, I think George Soros epitomizes hypocrisy. Having made a bloody fortune in speculation, he advocates socialism and speaks in terms of economic pessimism (all the while ignoring the new economy):

In a documentary that aired on the BBC, Soros asserted that the current malaise in the U.S. financial markets signals the end of the age of leverage, easy money, and rapid growth. The new danger, he worried, would be that growing protectionism would send the global economy into a recession, "or worse."

Oddly, he went on to say to the makers of the aptly named documentary Super Rich: the Greed Game that the benefits of the super boom weren't evenly distributed; in reality, relatively few people like himself benefited from the boom of the past 60 years. The implication: average folks have been fighting over table scraps for decades. Hardly makes one nostalgic for the good old super boom days.

[...]

Like an old general fighting the last war, maybe Soros really does despair for the world economy, or perhaps like an old lion, he has simply lost his stomach for the hunt.

I recently read (and highly recommend) an essay titled "Europe's Philosophy of Failure" by Stefan Theil. The thesis:

In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe's economies prosper or continue to be left behind.

Textbooks teach the minutiae of employer-employee relations, workplace conflict, collective bargaining, unions, strikes, and worker protection. Even a cursory look at the country's textbooks shows that many are written from the perspective of a future employee with a union contract. Bosses and company owners show up in caricatures and illustrations as idle, cigar-smoking plutocrats, sometimes linked to child labor, Internet fraud, cell-phone addiction, alcoholism, and, of course, undeserved layoffs. The successful, modern entrepreneur is virtually nowhere to be found.

German students will be well-versed in many subjects upon graduation; one topic they will know particularly well is their rights as welfare recipients. One 10th-grade social studies text titled FAKT has a chapter on "What to do against unemployment." Instead of describing how companies might create jobs, the section explains how those without jobs can organize into self-help groups and join weekly anti-reform protests "in the tradition of the East German Monday demonstrations" (which in 1989 helped topple the communist dictatorship). The not-so-subtle subtext? Jobs are a right to be demanded from the government. The same chapter also details various welfare programs, explains how employers use the threat of layoffs as a tactic to cut pay, and concludes with a long excerpt from the platform of the German Union Federation, including the 30-hour work week, retirement at age 60, and redistribution of the work pie by splitting full-time into part-time jobs. No market alternative is taught. When fakt presents the reasons for unemployment, it blames computers and robots. In fact, this is a recurring theme in German textbooks--the Internet will turn workers into "anonymous code" and kill off interpersonal communication.

One might expect Europeans to view the world through a slightly left-of-center, social-democratic lens. The surprise is the intensity and depth of the anti-market bias being taught in Europe's schools. Students learn that private companies destroy jobs while government policy creates them. Employers exploit while the state protects. Free markets offer chaos while government regulation brings order. Globalization is destructive, if not catastrophic. Business is a zero-sum game, the source of a litany of modern social problems. Some enterprising teachers and parents may try to teach an alternative view, and some books are less ideological than others. But given the biases inherent in the curricula, this background is unavoidable. It is the context within which most students develop intellectually. And it's a belief system that must eventually appear to be the truth.

This bias has tremendous implications that reach far beyond the domestic political debate in these two countries. These beliefs inform students' choices in life. Taught that the free market is a dangerous wilderness, twice as many Germans as Americans tell pollsters that you should not start a business if you think it might fail. According to the European Union's internal polling, just two in five Germans and French would like to be their own boss, compared to three in five Americans. Whereas 8 percent of Americans say they are currently involved in starting a business, that's true of only 2 percent of Germans and 1 percent of the French. Another 28 percent of Americans are considering starting a business, compared to just 11 percent of the French and 18 percent of Germans. The loss to Europe's two largest economies in terms of jobs, innovation, and economic dynamism is severe.

Telling people they cannot succeed without help from above may label itself as socialism, but the condescension involved resembles the classic feudal model in which the lords kept the peasants down by restricting their freedom of movement, taking a hefty share of what they produced, and above all by taking care of them (or at least promising to).

One way of preventing success is to prevent failure, because when failure is not an option, success becomes elusive.

What's often overlooked in the recent sub-prime mess is that much of it resulted from a policy grounded in making failure impossible. Economist Stan Liebowitz explains:

At the crisis' core are loans that were made with virtually nonexistent underwriting standards - no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant's ability to make payments; no down payment.

Most people instinctively understand that such loans are likely to be unsound. But how did the heavily-regulated banking industry end up able to engage in such foolishness?

From the current hand-wringing, you'd think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards - at the behest of community groups and "progressive" political forces.

What's being missed is that they are already victims of the "help" that made it impossible for them to fail.

I'm sure more help is on the way.