MidnightCall Magazine
In this issue:
- Hear theWord of the Lord — By Thomas Lieth
- FirstThessalonians 3 and the Rapture — By Dr. Ron J. Bigalke Jr.
- Popular Prophecy:CheckingDogmaTwice — By Wilfred Hahn
News From Israel MagazineIn this issue:
- Why Jerusalem is Jewish — By Arno Froese
- ON THE HORIZON:
- Analysis: Birthright Needs to Transform on Larger Scale
- Israel Praises Turkish Authority for Preventing Hezbollah Attack
- Relationship with American Jews Is Changing
- A Festival of Discrimination—Funded by the EU
- The Cyrus Cylinder
Will the Tortoises Cross the Line First?
Slow-and-steady may win the race in fables, but that’s not always how it works in the economy. Since 1992, the United States has grown at a speedy 3 percent; France and Germany have plodded forward at about 1.7 percent a year. But as the world’s economies slog toward recovery, Europe’s tortoises look as if they just might hit the finish line first.
Pricey social safeguards—universal health care, unemployment benefits—help explain the difference, but attitudes toward government spending are also key. While Americans view state spending as waste, Europeans understand that governments spend money to acquire assets. That includes bridges and nuclear reactors, but also hard-to-price, intangible assets like a well-educated and healthy population. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has gone so far as to ask economist Joseph Stiglitz to look at ways to include intangible assets in measures of prosperity such as GDP.
Welfare programs have helped European consumers continue spending—U.S. retail sales fell nearly 10 percent in the year ending March 2009, but just 3.9 percent in France. As the economist Anton Brender wrote, “the income of a jobless French person is very much higher than most of the workers in the world.” Hares, on the other hand, don’t collect generous unemployment benefits.
Newsweek, 25 May 2009, pg. 13
This report by Christopher Dickey reveals Europe’s progress—slowly but surely. Although Europe’s workforce is the most expensive in the world, they receive benefits unimaginable in any other place. The E.U. is surefooted in their worker-dominated ideological, socialist system, which virtually guarantees a degree of prosperity for all its citizens. If these “intangible assets” are added to the GDP, the United States, for example, could not even be considered a challenger.
What does it mean from biblical perspectives? It reconfirms that the last Gentile superpower is Rome. Rome represents Europe and Europe has dominated the world. It is not surprising that nations on the continents of Asia, Africa and America now pattern their political, economical, and financial philosophy on the European model.