You gotta fight, for your right...

[kandrathe]

Here we go again, NOTA versus SOTA (North of the Alps versus South Of The Alps)

You might say this is Guelphs vs Ghibellines, chapter MCMCCLIII.

DR

Italy is a microcosm of what is wrong with the EU. The south is a criminal run enterprise and feeds on the productive north, and has no reason to ever change.

I happen to be in the middle of re-reading "Atlas Shrugged", and today I just happened to be reading Francisco's money speech.

Particularly this part struck me --

Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

In general, I'm finding the book tragically ironic in the wake of current events from laws being passed to mine disasters and offshore oil wells erupting due to negligence.