DÜSSELDORF, Germany — The European Union remains, at least in theory, a union of sovereign nation-states. Even within the nearly identical Eurozone, national budget sovereignty still prevails. But now, through a mix of war rhetoric and Putin panic, efforts are underway to consolidate national debts at the EU level. Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz of Merkel’s CDU, delivered his inaugural government address on Wednesday. The speech, held in the Bundestag, was dominated by talk of Ukraine and the Russian threat. Germany’s prolonged recession? Brushed aside with empty phrases. He spoke much of “Europe,” with vague hints at a paradigm shift. But no substance, no pragmatic solutions. Just political waffle. Hot air without traction in the real world. Today’s Germany is merely a symptom of the larger European disease. (RELATED: German Decline: A Warning From Across the Atlantic) When the Purse is Empty, Beat the War Drum Merz’s speech could serve as a textbook on how to repackage domestic failure as geopolitical urgency. Over half of his address was dedicated to foreign policy and the Ukraine war — despite Germany’s crumbling infrastructure, collapsing housing market, and a historic wave of illegal immigration that no politician dares address without being tarred as “far-right.” (RELATED: Europe’s Asylum Catastrophe: A Warning America Cannot Ignore) His focus? Rearmament. A strong Bundeswehr. He promises to make Germany’s army “the strongest conventional force in Europe,” and proclaims that Germany is “not a neutral party” in the war. In other words, essentially a co-belligerent. That’s not accidental. The war narrative serves a dual function: to distract from domestic collapse and to justify the upcoming introduction of Eurobonds — joint debt instruments that are, according to the Maastricht Treaty, strictly prohibited. (RELATED: The Euro’s Paper Empire: Germany’s Big Bond Gamble) But fear rules first. Once the invisible curtain of panic descends, old fiscal rules vanish. In the fog of war, the strongman prevails. What was once illegal becomes policy. War hysteria paves the backdoor to debt consolidation — something the ECB or the EU Commission would never admit openly. Taxpayers become the last collateral for an energy-starved Europe that can hardly hide its envious glances at Russia’s resource wealth. (RELATED: Europe’s Energy Suicide: Brussels Trades Industry for Ideology) The plan is simple: the European Commission issues debt, the ECB buys the bonds, and the growing debt pile remains liquid. Inflation? Blame “Putinflation.” In political newspeak, this is called “solidarity” — but it means that national fiscal discipline gets drowned in Brussels bureaucracy. Germany, knowingly or not, becomes the main sponsor. Get ready, fellow Europeans, for a hot summer: media heatwaves, war drums, and yet another debt acceleration in a stagnating Eurozone. Merzonomics: Hollow Promises, Real Debt Merz’s economic program is a patchwork of contradictions. He pledges tax relief for low earners — “if the economy allows it.” It won’t. He wants to cut bureaucracy — by creating a new ministry. Only a Prussian bureaucrat could come up with that. He promises to meet climate goals without offshoring industry — by tweaking the very CO₂ pricing system that already destroyed competitiveness. No mention of restarting nuclear power. No Russia diplomacy. No rollback of the destructive “Green Deal,” the crown jewel of globalist policy. (RELATED: Germany’s Suicide Pact with Green Ideology) The heart of his stimulus plan? A trillion-euro investment and defense spending surge — financed through debt rule exemptions and a massive bond program arranged before he took office. For the rest, Merz hopes foreign capital will flood into Germany. That’s wishful thinking in a world where Trump sets a new benchmark with tax cuts, deregulation, and real political will. Merz flies abroad not to attract capital, but to distribute it — as climate reparations and development aid. It’s become tradition in a country that replaced rational policy with moralizing gestures and globalist soundbites. Even his much-praised housing initiative rings hollow. A “building offensive” is promised — while the construction sector is in free fall. Red tape, high interest rates, and regulatory overload have paralyzed private construction. Like German industry, the building sector is in a deep depression. Nothing moves. Since 2022, half a million jobs have vanished — further straining Germany’s overstretched welfare system. The deindustrialization of Germany — once the growth engine of Europe — is dramatic. Each year, Germany loses between €60 to €90 billion in direct investment. That’s capital that could build companies, jobs, and hope for a generation increasingly stuck in their parents’ homes. Dignity is vanishing. Three consecutive years of contraction have reduced the post-war “economic miracle” to a memory. Yet Merz dares proclaim that Germany will be Europe’s new “growth locomotive.” A bold claim from a man who couldn’t even secure full support from his own party in the first round of the vote. Migration: The Crisis the Left Can’t Name Where Merz becomes evasive, his rhetoric turns abstract. He talks about “renewing the promise of prosperity.” What does that even mean? Another five-year Brussels plan of Chinese inspiration? At least he admits that illegal immigration draws in unskilled masses — but refuses to even discuss cutting welfare entitlements like Bürgergeld. Instead, he declares that “Germany is and will remain a country of immigration.” Stubborn, unrepentant, EU-compliant. This is no accident. Mass immigration serves a fiscal function: it inflates GDP through debt-fueled government programs, fills low-wage jobs, and delays the pension implosion. But it comes at a steep price: social cohesion, internal security, and housing markets are buckling. Merz’s refusal to acknowledge this isn’t ignorance — it’s pure ideology. At heart, Merz is a Brussels bureaucrat, cut from the same cloth as von der Leyen & Co. (RELATED: The Scandinavian Lesson: What Malmö Warns Us About America’s Sanctuary Cities) And these Europeans are broke. Not metaphorically. Not in the euphemisms of “fiscal headwinds” or “budgetary challenges.” They are structurally insolvent. The continent is sleepwalking into a sovereign debt crisis of historic proportions — masked only by central bank interventions and a stage-managed Cold War fear narrative. The numbers? France’s national debt is nearing €3.2 trillion — 110 percent of GDP. Italy? Over 140 percent — beyond any reasonable boundary. For reference, just 15 years ago, a 143 percent debt ratio from Greece nearly brought the Eurozone to collapse. It took trillions in emergency measures and taxpayer bailouts to keep the rotten edifice afloat. Across much of Southern Europe, fiscal discipline has evaporated. The ECB is expected to cover the shortfall. Inflation? Not Frankfurt’s problem — for now. Growth? Stagnant or negative. Private investment? Collapsing. Demographics? A disaster. Youth unemployment remains chronically high, and an aging population is now funded by a shrinking workforce. Social costs are borne by labor, and no one dares put the sacred cow of the welfare state on a diet. Business Model Broken Behind the theatrical language and smug tone lies a grim reality. Europe’s economic model — cheap Russian energy, open U.S. markets, and industrial strength fueled by an undervalued euro — is gone. The ECB is cornered: raise rates, and governments go bankrupt; print money, and the euro dies. Yet recessionary pressure will force the planners in Frankfurt to debase the currency. If not, pressure from the indebted capitals will mount. President Trump is already capitalizing on Europe’s weakness. In the ongoing transatlantic tariff dispute, the EU stands as the last negotiator — economically stagnant, energy-dependent, and militarily reliant on Washington. Trump demands more defense spending, fewer industrial subsidies, and direct bilateral deals — not Brussels’ bureaucratic obstruction. In this setup, Europe isn’t a partner. It’s a bargaining chip. The European political class — protected by EU governance from electoral consequences — seeks to preserve the system at citizens’ expense. Wrapped in the language of “solidarity,” but with a clear eye on private wealth. The planned EU asset register fits neatly into a digital euro regime: full control, full surveillance. READ MORE from Thomas Kolbe: German Decline: A Warning From Across the Atlantic Trump Exposes Fractures in the Global Order The Race for Space: Europe Bets on Eutelsat to Challenge Musk’s Starlink The post German Chancellor Calls for ‘War Readiness’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

A few blocks from where I sit writing this is Emory University Hospital Midtown, where Adriana Smith, a beautiful 30-year-old mother who was declared brain dead, is on life support. Smith is being kept on a ventilator because she is pregnant with her second child, a son. Emory Healthcare determined that, per Georgia state law forbidding abortions once a child has a heartbeat, it must keep Smith on life support until her baby son is born. In this terribly tragic situation, it is a miracle — and a testimony to incredible advances in medical science — that Smith’s baby will hopefully survive. Smith was declared brain dead after suffering multiple brain clots. Yet Smith’s mother is now speaking out to complain that she doesn’t have the “choice” to decide whether her grandson will live or die. April Newkirk, Smith’s mother, said earlier this week: “It should have been left up to the family…. I’m not saying that we would have chose to terminate her pregnancy, but what I’m saying is, we should have had a choice.” (RELATED: America’s Abortion Blind Spot: How Liberals Convinced Americans to Ignore the Fetus) Newkirk pointed to the possibility that her grandson will be born with disabilities, as well as the fact that the responsibility to raise him will now be hers. “She’s pregnant with my grandson. But he may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he’s born,” she said. “This decision should’ve been left to us. Now we’re left wondering what kind of life he’ll have — and we’re going to be the ones raising him.” The child’s father is in the picture as well. The baby also has an older brother, who has been visiting his mother in the hospital. One hopes that this little boy will never hear how his grandmother publicly wished for the choice to let him die, for fear of his potential disabilities or the effort it will take to raise him. And one expects that Adriana Smith would not want her family to just take care of her older son, and leave her younger son to die, but that they would take care of and love both of them. If her family isn’t willing to do that, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of American couples who would adopt this baby boy. Luckily, thanks to Georgia’s laws against abortion, April Newkirk will not be able to decide whether to kill her grandson. A spokesman for Emory Healthcare said in a statement that it “uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws.” Unfortunately, the reaction to this situation in certain quarters has been rather insane. This was the most apparent in New York magazine. Andrea González-Ramírez, “a senior writer for the Cut who covers systems of power,” wrote about Adriana Smith’s situation Thursday in an article headlined “We’re Just Human Incubators to Them.” González-Ramírez writes that Smith’s situation proves that “To abortion opponents, a woman is nothing more than a vessel.” “Smith’s story,” she writes, “is a monstrous new entry in the canon of post-Dobbs indignities and horrors.” González-Ramírez goes on, saying that Smith’s loved ones are experiencing a “horror” and that abortion opponents “want to strip women of their dignity, humanity, and right to bodily autonomy.” González-Ramírez expresses outrage that Smith’s family will “have to be responsible for a child who may face numerous health challenges if born.” In contrast to the absurdity offered by González-Ramírez, a beautiful perspective on this situation is offered by a Georgia state senator, Ed Setzler. Setzler said, “I think this is an unusual circumstance, but I think it highlights the value of innocent human life.” Indeed, in the face of the terrible tragedy of Adriana Smith’s death, we have the marvel of countless medical professionals working for months to keep her baby son alive. This is evidently a very difficult task. “It’s just hard to keep the mother out of infection, out of cardiac failure,” said Dr. Vincenzo Berghella, director of maternal fetal medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Adriana Smith’s baby son is as infinitely valuable as herself. It is a great goodness in the face of such tragedy that these medical professionals are working to preserve his life, as they worked to preserve hers. But, were you to listen to González-Ramírez, this is a disgrace. “The anti-abortion movement imbues every fetus with nearly messianic potential while discarding the pregnant person carrying it as a nonentity.” In reality, González-Ramírez is just denying the humanity of this little baby, casting him aside as useless and irrelevant. The miracle of his survival is “monstrous” to her; pregnancy is inherently disgusting to her for its compromise of “autonomy”; and human life is just something to be disposed of in the interest of supposed freedom. The one dehumanizing a human being is González-Ramírez, who calls the unborn baby “the pregnancy.” She says, “The pregnancy is now around 21 weeks of gestation.” In other words, he is nearly to the point of being able to survive outside his mother’s womb. Contra González-Ramírez, the pro-life movement does not view women as “vessels.” In fact, she is the one who views human beings as parasitical non-human entities and women as incubators of worthless clumps of cells. The pro-life movement sees mothers as miraculously upholding a new human life. Not, as per González-Ramírez, “people” in a monstrous and parasitical situation with a strange entity horrifically growing inside them. READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: New York Times Concocts Narrative About Leo XIV How the Porn Industry Is Fueled by Nonconsensual Videos As Cardinals Enter the Conclave, Anything Could Happen The post A Miracle Baby Is Surviving His Mother’s Brain Death, and the Left Is Outraged appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

When I was a boy, I loved numbers, and I still do. Only when I was a sophomore at Princeton did I shift my attention from mathematics to literature, in part because the same part of my mind that loves numbers also loves poetry. “I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came,” said Alexander Pope, describing his early childhood and his poetic fascination. I entered Princeton, wanting to become a mathematician and a poet, the former serving to support the latter. I did not know, when I entered, anything about the childhood of such mathematical geniuses as Pascal or Maxwell or Ramanujan. Nor had there been anyone in the schools I attended who could have made me aware of them. I did not have teachers who enjoyed play with numbers. What used to be called Higher Arithmetic had long been eliminated from American curricula, as was mental math, which I was a whiz at. Sometimes, to help settle my brain to go to sleep, I square four-digit numbers in my head, or test four- or five-digit odd numbers not divisible by 3 to see if they are prime. Call it a pointless hobby. But there are a lot of things that people could have shown me, if they had known about them and if school had not been set up against their showing them. No advanced mathematics would have been necessary. These are doorways into the advanced. Let me give an example. Suppose you have a prime number — say, 37. You are now going to divide by 37 a positive integer N that is not itself a multiple of 37; say, 43. The remainder may be anything from 1 to 36, with an equal chance for each remainder. But now multiply N by itself before you divide. The remainders suddenly are not all represented; 2, 5, 8, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 29, 32, and 35 are out. Raise N to the 6th power and then divide by 37. Now the only remainders possible are 1, 10, 11, 26, 27, and 36. Raise N to the 9th power, and the only remainders possible are 1, 6, 31, and 36. But for powers 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, and others, all the remainders are equally likely. For the 18th power, the only remainders are 1 and 36; for the 36th power, the only remainder is 1. You don’t have to do all that cumbersome multiplication, though. You can show the child that for the sake of the problem, only the remainders count. If N/37 leaves a remainder of 2, for example, then N might as well be 2. Since 38/37 leaves a remainder of 1, that remainder is going to stay the same regardless of how often you multiply 38 by itself. The results are quite pretty when you draw them out, especially if you label the higher half of the 36 remainders as negatives, so that, for example, the remainder of 36 in the problem above would be labeled as -1, because it falls 1 short of 37. The most fascinating patterns arise. “But what is the point?” you ask. The professional point, assuming that we must have one, is that you are giving the child an important introduction to Number Theory, one of the most active branches of mathematics. The human point is that this is play, involving delight in pure knowledge and discovery. (RELATED: Invest in Education, Not the Department of Education) Or you can do what the boy James Clerk Maxwell did, using twine and a ruler to draw a variety of interesting mathematical curves; this will be the child’s introduction to advanced geometry. Or you can prove the Pythagorean theorem without algebra, even without any numbers besides the idea of doubling, by drawing certain squares, rectangles, and triangles. You can open the door to topology by asking what sounds like a simple question but is not: “What shapes can you make from a flat piece of paper? What shapes can you not make?” Higher arithmetic has all kinds of applications. Why does a ballplayer’s batting average rise when he gets a hit? How is that like adding a drop of pure alcohol to a solution of alcohol and water? He is batting .300, but he goes 1 for 4, and his average drops a little. How is that like adding a little bit of a more dilute solution to one already prepared? We can do similar things with physics, without advanced mathematics. Why does a billiard ball spinning clockwise strike the bank and veer to the left? Or how does the ball carom off another ball of the same weight, if the other ball is itself not resting on a bank? Or with chemistry: how can certain insects skate on water? What characterizes the water molecule that makes it possible? And with poetry. Maxwell, taught by his mother till she died when he was eight, committed long passages from Paradise Lost to memory. Why not? The boys in Shakespeare’s troupe committed whole parts to memory — and played some of the greatest roles ever written for female characters: Cleopatra, Rosalind, Miranda, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Viola, Beatrice, and many more. Teachers of English to children should have the grand vistas in mind, bringing before them whatever wonders they are ready for, and leading them to thirst for more. (RELATED: Leisure for Thought) What I am suggesting would not have seemed strange to the men who taught boys when school was not meant to “socialize,” a role for which ours are singularly ill-suited anyway. Nor were their schools meant to keep young people in holding tanks for twelve years, because nobody can figure out what else to do with them. I am not implying that there should be some ghastly national curriculum to integrate material taught in the earliest years with what real mathematicians, physicists, poets, artists, and engineers do. That would destroy the spirit of the enterprise, and it would universalize and perpetuate the inevitable mistakes. For 70 years, we have known what a disaster it was to dumb down children’s readers and to have children treat English words as if they were hieroglyphics. Yet we are still fighting against it. Besides, bureaucratization frustrates or repels the most imaginative among us. Set them free. (RELATED: Reclaiming Education for Boys) Abolish all requirements that teachers have degrees or certificates in education. There is no such thing as “education” apart from the subject to be taught. If you are going to teach arithmetic, learn more and more about math, so you can direct your charges to higher things. Are you going to teach English? Learn more and more about the language and its literature. If you are not fascinated by language and grammar, you are in the wrong line of work. Be aware of what vistas grammatical knowledge opens up; know about other languages besides English. If you are teaching history, you may do well to collect old tools and learn how they were used, and why should you not have a stack of maps to pore over? Maxwell was a very bright boy, no question, but his fellows in the Edinburgh Academy did not consider his knowledge of Milton to be all that prodigious — not by itself. We want those conditions again. We need teachers who know where the paths are that ascend the heights, and schools to encourage them or at least get out of the way. READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: Love and Reason in the Ruins On Old Snobs and New Woke Isn’t Quite Dead: Chaucer Now Comes With Trigger Warnings The post Keep the End in View appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

One of the most unconscionable things the government did during the pandemic was to impose “lock downs” — i.e., extended closures — on small, independently owned businesses while allowing large, corporate chain stores to remain open. Thousands of small, independently owned businesses went out of business as a result. Fast forward to now, and a similar situation has developed, as regards the president’s tariffs. While they will affect large, corporate chain stores such as Walmart, they will have a disproportionate effect on small, independently owned retailers for essentially the same reason these retailers were disproportionately affected by the months — years, in some cases — of being “locked down” during the height of the pandemic — small, independently owned businesses are less able to absorb the losses. The U.S Chamber of Commerce recently sent an open letter to Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent that asks him to consider measures to lessen the disproportionate impact of tariffs on small businesses by granting them an exemption if they can demonstrate that the add-on cost of tariffs will result in American workers losing their jobs. The exemption would apply to products that cannot be produced in the United States or which are not readily available from manufacturers located in the United States at the present time due to regulatory compliance costs. (RELATED: Trump’s Underwhelming UK Trade Deal) A good example is chrome-plated parts. It is effectively (read: economically) untenable to chrome-plate parts in the United States due to the cost of regulatory compliance. The process involves highly toxic materials and processes. Regulations regarding both are far less stringent — if they exist at all — in other parts of the world, especially Asia (China) and also Central and South America. That is why the bulk of chrome plating is done outside the United States — and by dint of that, the bulk of chrome-plated parts are imported into the United States. Applying tariffs to these parts will obviously result in them becoming more expensive. But large retailers — who are able to leverage economies of scale by purchasing in bulk — can offer chrome-plated parts for less than small retailers and are also able to absorb losses because they can make them up on volume sales. They are also more able to ride out price volatility — caused by changing market conditions and supply chain disruptions. This same dynamic favored large retailers during the pandemic, increasing both their market share and their profits at the expense of small retailers. The Chamber is arguing — with regard to tariffs — that something be done to level the playing field this time. Before the damage is done. Some imported goods, the Chamber’s open letter argues, can’t be made in America because it’s just not practical to make or produce them here. Coffee and bananas, for instance. These grow best in other parts of the world. Adding to the cost of these necessary staples of the American table by adding the cost of tariffs will only make them more expensive for Americans who are already struggling with the cost of staples such as eggs, which have become almost a luxury item for many Americans. “Raising prices on those products will only hurt families struggling to pay their bills,” says Suzanne Clarke, the president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce. It will hurt worse if the breadwinner of those families becomes unemployed because his small business failed or because he got laid off from his job working for a small business. “The administration should protect American workers facing imminent job loss from the impact of tariffs by allowing for exemptions for companies at risk of layoffs,” Clarke says. “The Chamber supports many of the President’s policy goals, including eliminating unfair trade and non-trade barriers, and driving American investment. At the same time, we have heard from a historic number of small businesses who have made it clear: they need immediate relief from tariffs.” It’s important to keep in mind that these small businesses have barely had time to recover from the effects of the pandemic, the worst of which, in terms of the lockdowns and partial re-openings, is only about two years in the rearview. Many of the owners of these small businesses support the president and the policy goals he says tariffs will help to advance. They agree on the importance of bringing good-paying jobs back to America. But if they are forced to go out of business as a result of the increased cost of doing business, many Americans stand to lose their jobs, the Chamber says. “As each day goes by, small businesses are increasingly endangered by higher costs and interrupted supply chains that will cause irreparable harm,” Clarke says. Just as happened during the pandemic. “We applaud the administration’s efforts to negotiate as many new trade agreements as possible that expand market access for U.S. companies and benefit American workers, but these deals take time, and many businesses simply can’t afford to wait while negotiations proceed.” More finely, they can’t afford to eat the cost of tariffs, just as they could not afford to eat the cost of being closed for business for months on end while chainstore outlets did all the business. A more global and long-term solution that would benefit all businesses — and all Americans — would be to deal with the regulatory overreach and compliance costs that have made doing business in America so expensive — and the cost-of-living so expensive for Americans. But making sure American small businesses don’t pay for the costs of offshoring they have little control over would at least prevent a repeat of what happened during the pandemic, when tens of thousands of small businesses went out of business for good, would at least be a step in the right direction. READ MORE from Eric Peters: Less Is Still Too Much ‘Defrauding’ the United States Taxes by Another Name The post Another ‘Lock Down’ for Small Businesses? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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