Two Days with Real and Wannabee Elite

By Doug Casey

Recently I made a few comments about the world’s self-identified “elite”, and also about the migrants that are plaguing Europe. Happily, I was able to do some one stop shopping on both of these topics when I was in New York to attend a very elitist and Globalist conference. I’m not going to name it because its organizers/sponsors are business partners of mine. 

And since they spent multi millions putting it together, and I pretty much despised their invitees, I’m not about to identify it exactly. Just let me say that the conclave has aspirations to become another Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg, Bohemian Grove, Atlantic Council, or Davos. Same kind of people, same ideas. Uniformly bad ideas. But ideas that the public has been brainwashed into thinking are good.

A lot of people are afraid these groups control the world, or at least governments. They don’t. They’re social gatherings for high level government employees and NGO types who like to network, and feel relevant. And lots of their minions, who enjoy the rich food, pretending they’re big shots too, while listening to pontifications by actual big shots. They hope they can cozy up to them, close enough to ride a richer gravy train.

The avowed purpose of this conclave was to “build the public private partnership”—the exact definition of fascism. So there were also lots of big league corporate types who want to “make a difference”, and rich guys who want to be known for something besides having money.

Warren Buffett

The program opened with Warren Buffett’s talk about how he didn’t need $50 billion, didn’t believe anybody else did either, and why he was a “philanthropist” who would give it all away. The avuncular Buffett is an investment genius; I enjoyed and agreed with everything he said on investing. But, like his friend Bill Gates, he’s also an autistic idiot savant. That’s someone who is a genius at one thing, and a fool at most everything else.

Most people assume that if you know about investing, you must also know about economics, which is a related discipline. But that’s completely untrue. It’s analogous to thinking that someone who knows how to drive a car also knows how one works. Economics is the study of how men go about producing and consuming; investing is the practice of allocating capital for maximum returns. Buffett’s grasp of economics is shallow, conventional, and unrelated to his success as an investor.

Furthermore, if Buffett was really a philanthropist he wouldn’t dissipate his $50 billion on poor people in Third World countries (which is where I suspect most of what’s left after administrative expenses will go). That will assuage some liberal guilt, but will vanish without a trace like water poured into the Sahara.
And actually just make the root problem worse in many ways. If he really wants to help his fellow man, he would continue compounding capital at 20%, forever. Capital makes the world wealthy; consuming or frittering away capital makes the world poor. But enough on Buffett. He only exasperated me for about 40 minutes out of two full days.

George Soros

Much worse was George Soros. He spent his time not just passively endorsing (like Buffett), but actively promoting disastrous policies. In essence, these were his major points. 

1) Brexit should be overturned, regardless of the vote. 
2) The EU should spend at least $200 billion a year (in addition to what individual countries spend) both to make migrants welcome, and to install a Marshall Plan for Africa. 
3) All of Europe should import migrants at least proportionally to the 1mm entering Germany. He recognized that the migrants represent an “existential crisis” for Europe, but believes the solution is to accommodate them. 
4) The EU should actively arm against Russia. 
5) The EU in Brussels should be granted the right to tax.

As I listened to him I felt I’d been transported to Bizzarro World, or perhaps some magic land from Gulliver’s Travels, where everything is upside down, wrong is right, and black is white. Just as much of Soros’ presentation was on migration, so was much of the rest of the conference. It’s very much on the minds of the “elite”.

His new Marshall Plan would consist of Europe and the US sending trillions to African governments to develop the Continent. Strange, really. Africa has received about a trillion of foreign aid over the last 50 years; that capital has either been wasted on uneconomic boondoggles, or shipped off to the bank accounts of the ruling class. Soros is far from naïve; he’s got to know this. 

I wonder what he actually hopes to accomplish, and why? After all, he’s 84 years old, and doesn’t need any more money. Well, it’s hard to be sure how some people’s minds are wired. And, as The Phantom once asked, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”

Incidentally—completely contrary to conventional wisdom—I consider the much lauded Marshall Plan to have been an unnecessary and destructive boondoggle. But this isn’t the moment to explain why that’s true.
As I said above, the Summit was centered on migration. I’ve recently commented on the subject, and will reiterate a few points below before returning to the views of the Globalists and self-identified Elite.

A Word on Migration

Let me start by saying I’m all for immigration and completely open borders to enable opportunity seekers from anyplace to move anyplace else. With two big, critically important, caveats..... 

1) there can be no welfare or free government services, so everyone has to pay his own way, and no freeloaders are attracted 
2) all property is privately owned, to minimize the possibility of squatter camps full of beggars.

In the absence of welfare benefits, immigrants are usually the best of people because you get mobile, aggressive, and opportunity seeking people that want to leave stagnant and repressive cultures for vibrant and liberal ones. That was the case with the millions of immigrants who came to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And they had zero in the way of state support.

But what is going on in Europe today is entirely different. The migrants coming to Europe aren’t being attracted by opportunity in the new land so much as the welfare benefits and the soft life. Western Europe is a massive welfare state that providing free food, housing, medical care, schooling, and living expenses to all comers. Benefits like these will naturally draw in poor people from poor countries. For the most part they’ll be unskilled, poorly educated, and many will have a bad attitude. The question arises why—since they’re almost all Muslims—they aren’t being welcomed by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, or Brunei, which are wealthy Muslim countries.

What we’re talking about here is the migration of millions of people of different language, different race, different religion, different culture, and different mode of living. If you’re an alien and you’re 1 out of 10,000, or 1000, or even 100, you’re a curiosity, an interesting outsider. And you’d have to integrate in the new society. But an influx of millions of migrants can only destroy the old culture. And guarantee antagonism—especially when the locals are forced to pay for it. In many ways, what’s happening now isn’t just comparable to what happened 2,000 years ago with the migration of the Germanic barbarians into the Roman Empire. It’s potentially much more serious.

Although most of the migration will be out of Africa, it’s supposed to be official Chinese policy to migrate about 300 million Chinese into Africa in the years to come. They’re employed in building roads, mines, railroads and other infrastructure. The Africans like the goodies, but don’t like the Chinese. It has the makings of a race war a generation or so in the future. 

The problem won’t only be tens or hundreds of millions of Africans migrating to Europe, but tens or hundreds of millions of Chinese migrating to Africa. The EU is a huge aggravating factor with the migrant situation. Brussels is full of globalists and doctrinaire socialists who not only promote bad policies, but make the whole continent pay for the mistakes of its most misguided members.

The migrants, who are manifestly unwelcome in Hungary, Poland, and other Eastern European countries, will prove another big impetus for the breakup of the EU. Millions of Africans will want to emigrate, especially to the homelands of their ex-colonial masters in Europe. The colonizers are now themselves being colonized. Fair enough, I suppose; a case of the sins of the father truly devolving upon the sons.

If I was an African from south of the Sahara, I’d absolutely try to get to Italy or Greece or France or Spain or on my way to Northern Europe to cash in on the largesse of these stupid Europeans. I’m a fan of what’s left of Western Civilization. I hate to see it washed away. But that’s what will happen if the floodgate is opened.

Unless the Europeans get in front of this situation, it’s not just some refugees from the Near East they’ll have to deal with. Especially with the economic chaos of The Greater Depression, it’s going to be many millions from Africa, and then perhaps millions more from Central Asia, and even India and Bangladesh. The world is becoming a very small place. What happens when scores of thousands of migrants set up a squatter camp someplace—with no food, shelter, or sanitary facilities? What will happen when there are scores or hundreds of squatter camps? Unlike the Goths and the Vandals, who became the new aristocracy, the chances of the Africans integrating is essentially zero. 

The situation is likely to be most stressful…..

Some will say “But you have to be charitable, you can’t just let them starve because they’ve had some bad luck”. To that I’d say an individual, or a family, can have some bad luck. But the places these people come from have had “bad luck” for centuries. Their bad luck is the consequence of their political, economic, and social systems. Their cultures—let me note the elephant in the room—are backward, degraded, and unproductive. It makes no sense, it’s idiotic, to import—at huge expense—masses of people that have a culture of “bad luck”.

On just one day recently, the Italian Coast Guard rescued 10,000 Africans off the Libyan coast—almost all men from Guinea, Gambia, Nigeria, and neighboring countries—and transported them to Italy. It’s hard to see them ever going back home. But it’s certain they’ll encourage they’re friends and families to join them.
The situation can only get worse. Why? In 1950, the 250 million Africans were only 9% of the world’s population; it’s 27% now, but there will be 4 billion, for 40%, in 2100. 

Making that observation is highly politically incorrect, and presumably racist. I’ll have more to say on racism in the future. But the fact is that Africa has always been an economic basket case; if Vasco Da Gama had thrown out a wheel when he was rounding the Cape, he would also have had to throw out an instruction book on how to use it. But nobody could have read it.

Be that as it may. But Europeans made things worse when they conquered the continent and divided it up into political entities that made zero sense from a cultural, linguistic, religious or tribal viewpoint. That guaranteed chaos for the indefinite future. That’s why it’s always a mad scramble to get control of the government in these countries, in order to loot the treasury, entrench ones cronies, and punish ones enemies. Until there’s a bloody revolution, and the shoe goes on another foot.

Here’s the takeaway. The population of Africa is going up by several billion people in the years to come. The net wealth of the continent is going nowhere. The locals will want to move wholesale to Europe, where the living is easy. And where the politically correct Cultural Marxists are anxious to destroy their own civilization.
Meanwhile, there are hundreds of think tanks in the U.S. alone, most located within the Washington Beltway who believe that these people should be encouraged to migrate, or imported en masse. They’re populated by partisan academics, ex-politicos, retired generals and others circulating through the revolving doors of the military/industrial/political/academic complex.

They’re really just propaganda outlets, funded by foundations, and donors who want to give an intellectual patina to their views and, to use a popular phrase, “make a difference”.

Think tanks, and their cousins, the lobbyists and the NGOs, are mostly what I like to call Running Dogs, who act as a support system for the Top Dogs in the Deep State. Their product is “policy recommendations,” which influence how much tax you have to pay and how many new regulations you have to obey. Think tanks are populated almost exclusively by people who are, simultaneously, both “useful idiots” and “useless mouths.” They’re no friends of the common man.

The migration policies they’re promoting are creating minor chaos now. With world-class chaos in the wings.
Let me repeat, and re-emphasize, what I said earlier. The free-market solution to the migrant situation is quite simple. If all the property of a country is privately owned, anyone can come and stay as long as he can pay for his accommodations. When even the streets and parks are privately owned, trespassers, beggars, squatters, migrants, vagrants and the like have a problem. A country with 100% private property, and zero welfare, would only attract people who like those conditions. And they’d undoubtedly be welcome as individuals. But “migration” would be impossible.

This is how the migration problem could be solved. You don’t need the government. You don’t need the army. You don’t need visas or quotas. You don’t need laws. You don’t need treaties to solve the migration problem. All you need is privately owned property and the lack of welfare benefits. Instead, think tanks will come up with some cockamamie political solution. But the good news is that it will speed up the disintegration of the EU.

My prediction that the Continent will one day just be a giant petting zoo for the Chinese is intact—assuming the current wave of migrants approve. There will also be an exodus of capital and people from Europe to parts of Latin America, plus to the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This is, obviously, bad for Europe and good for the recipient countries, since these emigrants will be educated and affluent.
But, having said that, let me take you back to the conference where migration was a major topic of discussion by the elite.

Back to the Conference

Those are my thoughts on the topic of migration. Here’s what other attendees thought....

I spent a couple of hours listening to a panel entitled “Corruption in Latin America”. A bunch of ex-Presidents commiserated on how awful corruption is, and how new laws ought to be passed to stamp it out once and for all. They were all skilled, even enthusiastic, bullshit artists, who knew how to blather meaninglessly, saying nothing. They all agreed that illegal drugs were a major cause for corruption, but nobody thought to mention that maybe the problem wasn’t the drugs, but the fact they were illegal.
None of these people understood the actual causes and the nature of corruption. Which is ironic, since most of them were quite wealthy—something that’s hard to do on a Third World politician’s salary.

One especially naive panelist, representing the US State Department, said “many see the private sector as part of the problem”. What, one might ask, actually causes the problem?

The short answer was supplied by Tacitus 1900 years ago. He said “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the State”. That’s because the laws invariably have economic consequences, benefiting one group at the expense of another. The most practical way to obviate them is by paying off an official.

Naturally, nobody even broached the subject that laws themselves cause corruption. And corruption is actually not only necessary, but is encouraged, whenever economic laws are passed. Plan your life around corruption remaining endemic, no matter how much self-righteous apparatchiks blather on about it at conferences.

General David Petraeus

I listened to David Petraeus offer solutions to the world’s problems. They were what you might expect from an ex-general and CIA director. To David it’s all about using force and money “intelligently”. It never seemed to cross his mind that adventures like those in Iraq and Afghanistan ($6 trillion and counting, to accomplish absolutely nothing) might actually bankrupt the US. Or that he was intimately involved in the ongoing disaster.

My takeaway is that, after David collects say $20 million in the “private sector”, we’ll see him resurface as a candidate for the US Presidency. He’s smooth, polished, and confident. I was somewhat surprised that some general wasn’t tapped this election for a VP slot, since the military is the US Government’s most trusted branch by far. Rest assured there will be a general running in 2020.

Donald Rumsfeld also held the stage for 40 minutes. He was affable, likable, and entertaining, as are many sociopaths. Not even the faintest acknowledgement passed his lips about how the current migrant disaster was rooted in his unprovoked attacks on backward countries on the other side of the world. But why should he care? He’s already collected his $20 million in the “private sector” after many years of “service”.

The Migration Round Table

Another highlight was listening to a Round table on “The Public/ Private Partnership on Migration”. It might as well have been a meeting of the Soviet politburo, where everyone implicitly accepted the same totally flawed principles, speaking seriously and sincerely to each other about how they plan to change the world. These people were mainly interested in reinforcing each others views, like a conversation on NPR.

How to solve the refugee/migrant situation? No solutions were proposed by any of the 40 high government officials and think tank big shots. Everybody’s attention focused on two things: how awful the situation is, and how they can feed, clothe, and house the masses. I was amused at the sight of parasites talking to parasites about parasites.

References were made to “broader economic integration”, a nebulous phrase that can mean almost anything, and no references at all to freer markets. There were continual references to a “partnership” between the public and private sectors. It made me feel I was among aliens. How can there be a partnership between producers, and those who not only steal 50% of the production, but then want to direct where the remainder goes. These people all seemed to believe that if you earned money, you didn’t deserve to keep it. But if you needed money, you were entitled to it.

There was a discussion about how the crisis that started in 2007 has set back the progress of Africa. But zero discussion of what caused the crisis. Or what would happen when it stated up again (which is happening right now). The only discussion of how to create prosperity was about Special Economic Zones—areas insulated from the taxes and regulations affecting the rest of the country. Needless to say no one thought to ask why an entire country couldn’t become an SEZ.

A question occurred to me about the several hundred thousand refugees/migrants that still might be imported to the US—although it's much less likely with Trump as the President: Exactly who will pay for them, and how much will the pleasure of their company cost? These people have nothing but the rags on their backs. 

Will they be ferried to the US on commercial airliners? When they land, how will they be clothed? They’ll need to be fed for an indefinite period. And housed. And entertained. Mosques must be found, or founded, so they can worship. Very few have any marketable skills, and very few even speak English. Most of them could just stay on welfare for the rest of their lives.

It seems completely insane. But it’s clearly the “Globalist agenda”, endorsed by all these people. Of course there’s some perverse justice at work if the US winds up having to import a few million Muslim refuges. The Muslim world was, at least, stable before Bush and Obama went on a wild “regime change” adventure. Now chaos reigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya.

One justification put forward for migration to Europe was that its population was dropping, and it would need people, if only to take care of the oldsters. For what it’s worth, we’ll have robots doing that within a decade.

Conclusion?

You’re perhaps wondering how any sensible person could sit there and listen to such blather and nonsense for two days without reacting. Of course I wanted to debunk about 95% of what I heard. But the Summit was structured so that Guests didn’t have a forum from which to challenge the Nomenklatura and their Apparatchiks. So I sat there, observing an alien species in a sort of formalized mating ritual. No opportunity presented itself to shock these copulating dogs with a bucket of cold water. Certainly not from a seat in the Peanut Gallery.

Are conferences like this one, and its lookalikes, a waste of time? Completely. And keep that in mind before you make a contribution to a charity or an NGO. Could it have been worthwhile? Yes. If it had addressed the questions I posed above. But, even then, the answers would have been worthless, given the attendees.

I think migration is going to be one of the biggest problems in the next generation. It’s a sure thing that not just millions, but tens of millions of “feet people” and “boat people” are going to try to overrun Europe. If they’re accepted and resettled it will destroy what’s left of Western Civilization. If they’re repelled, it could result in millions of deaths, and be quite a scandal. I don’t know how this will sort out. But it’s going to be a big deal. And ugly.

What should you do? Own plenty of gold and silver, and make sure that you have one or more residences that are out of harm’s way.

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The article Doug Casey’s Two Days with the Real and Wannabee Elite was originally published at caseyresearch.com.

How to Profit From These Massive, Brexit Induced Trends

By Justin Spittler

This has the makings of a classic speculative opportunity—one where politically caused distortions are liquidated and prices readjust. But a word of caution. It’s going to take place within the context of the Greater Depression. And, as Richard Russell, who lived through the last depression, observed: In a depression, nobody wins. The winner is just the person who loses the least.

The EU will disintegrate. It never made sense from the beginning to try to get Swedes to live by the same rules as Sicilians or Germans by the same rules as Portuguese. Not to mention that the rules are entirely arbitrary. Worse, almost all the rules are economic in nature, with legislated winners and losers. Deals like that always lead to resentment, among both the winners and the losers.

In addition to this, the EU is very problematical when it comes to immigrants. There will be more migrants trying to settle in Europe. Why? Because the Muslim world, the swath of countries extending all across northern Africa, through the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Far East, is likely to become increasingly unstable. The EU, as a very politically correct organization is loathe to turn them away. However, once they’re within Schengen, the migrants can travel anywhere. Perhaps where welfare benefits are best and where other migrants are gathering. Remember, when times get tough, both politicians and the capite censi look for someone to blame.

How to profit from this? Most people don’t think the EU will collapse just because Britain (which has always been closer to the U.S. than the Continent anyway) has left. They’re wrong. For one thing, although Brussels won’t become a ghost town, it’s going to lose scores of thousands of highly paid Eurocrats and their minions. I recall that property there was some of the cheapest in Europe in the early ’80s, it’s going to return to that status. We’ll look for a REIT to sell short, specializing in the Brussels market.

It will accelerate the disintegration of nation-states everywhere. 

There are about 200 nation-states in the world. The international “elite,” the “intelligentsia,” the members of the Deep State everywhere, and organizations like the EU in Brussels, would like to see a much smaller number of more powerful states. Orwell anticipated just three mega-states in his dystopia. But the actual trend is in the opposite direction.

It’s not just the UK seceding from the EU, but Scotland from the UK. The Basques and Catalans may eventually secede from Spain. Belgium, a totally artificial country, may eventually break up into Flemish-speaking Flanders and French speaking Wallonia. France has half a dozen secession movements. Italy was only unified into its present form from scores of principalities, duchies, and baronies in 1871 by Garibaldi. It was the same with Germany until Bismarck in 1871. 

The break-up of the USSR in 1990 into 13 smaller states was a good start, but Russia itself is a small empire with dozens of distinct ethnic and linguistic groups. You will rarely hear about this in the mass media, but there are dozens of secession movements throughout Europe. That’s one more reason why (in addition to the interest rate risk and the inflation risk, which are both substantial) you should stay away from long-term government bonds.

The euro will cease to exist.....
The Esperanto currency was doomed from the beginning. It was not just an “IOU nothing,” like the U.S. dollar, but a “Who owes you nothing” since it’s not even backed by a specific government’s taxing power. How to profit? I’ve put on long-term futures contracts, long the British pound vs. short the euro. My rationale is simple. Britain will benefit from exiting the EU, attracting capital and strengthening the pound—which is down 11% against the euro since Brexit. The euro, meanwhile, will approach its intrinsic value at an accelerating rate.

A truly major banking crisis.....
Much worse than that of 2007–2009. Governments, who are all bankrupt, borrow money from commercial banks. Commercial banks have lent it to them because they believe it’s a risk free loan. Governments encourage them to lend recklessly, hoping that will jump-start sluggish economies. Central banks, which are the arms of their governments, have taken interest rates to zero and below for that reason and to make it easier for governments to service their debt. This policy has encouraged businesses to take on debt.

It’s an idiotic and reckless experiment that will end—likely in this cycle—with bankrupt central banks and governments bailing out bankrupt commercial banks and businesses. Just the way they did in 2007–2009. Except this time, the situation is much more serious. How to profit? Don’t own European companies, stocks or bonds, and banks in particular. In fact, even though they’re already down considerably, they’re going lower and are excellent candidates for short sales, or the sale of naked calls.

A panic into gold..... 
You’ve heard this story many times before here. But it’s truer than ever as we approach a genuine crisis. There are no stable paper currencies anywhere in the world. The dollar has been strong only because it’s liquid. Liquidity is good, but here, we’re talking about liquid like nitroglycerin. Hedge funds will start buying gold in size. As will central banks, who don’t want to hold each other’s paper. As will individual investors. Right now, few people even think about gold, much less understand it. How to profit? Buy gold. I expect we’ll see it well over $5,000 this cycle. Silver should do even better in relative terms. And gold stocks have explosive upside.

An exodus of capital and people from Europe.....
to parts of Latin America, plus to the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This is, obviously, bad for Europe and good for the recipient countries. In recent years, I might not have included Latin America, but things have changed. Argentina and Colombia are liberalizing economically. The continent isn’t involved in any entangling alliances, isn’t on the migration highway, and has low costs. Why a wealthy European would stay in that stagnant and unstable continent when he could live better, and mostly tax free, at a fraction of the cost in Argentina is a mystery to me.

Chaos in Africa..... 
Almost every country in Africa is an ex-European colony. Over the last 50 years, Europe, with the U.S. and now China, have shipped over a trillion dollars to the continent. Most of it has been recycled back to Europe by the African elites that stole it, and the rest has mostly been wasted. 

That flow is going to stop for a number of reasons, but among them is that it makes no sense in an “every-man for himself” world. At the same time, essentially all of the world’s population growth over the next couple of decades is going to come from sub Saharan Africa. It’s a nasty economic environment that’s a formula for conflict. 

Millions of Africans will want to emigrate, especially to the homelands of their ex-colonial masters in Europe. They won’t, however, be welcome. How might one take advantage of this? The higher population is going to put upward pressure on commodities, and the chaos is going to make their production much riskier in Africa.

In conclusion..... 
Brexit itself is likely to be good for Britain. And it augurs some big changes in the world at large. Don’t forget that it will all be in the context of both the Greater Depression and the accelerating and world-changing technological revolution I described last month. Our objective here remains to not only keep you advised of what’s happening, but help you profit from opportunities while avoiding major dangers.

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The article Weekend Edition: How to Profit From These Massive, Brexit-Induced Trends was originally published at caseyresearch.com.

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The Real Reason for the Refugee Crisis You Won’t Hear About in the Media

By Nick Giambruno

There’s a meme going around that the refugee crisis in Europe (the largest since World War II) is part of a secret plot to subvert the West. I completely understand why the locals in any country wouldn’t be happy about waves of foreigners pouring in. Especially if they’re poor, unskilled, and not likely to assimilate.

It leads to huge problems. Infrastructure gets strained. More people are sucking at the teat of the welfare system. The unwelcome newcomers compete for bottom of the ladder jobs. Things easily turn nasty and then turn violent. But the idea that the refugee crisis in Europe is part of a hidden agenda - rather than a predictable outcome - strikes me as strange. And it’s a notion that conveniently deflects blame away from the people and factors that deserve it.

Interventions Destabilize the Middle East

The civil war in Syria has turned the country into a refugee maker. Syria’s neighbors have reached their physical limit on their ability to absorb refugees. That’s one of the reasons so many are heading to the West. Lebanon has received over 1 million Syrian refugees. That’s an enormous number for a country with a population of only 4 million - a 25% increase. Jordan and Turkey also have millions of Syrian refugees.

They’re saturated.

The number of refugees heading to the West, by contrast, is in the hundreds of thousands. So far. But it’s not just Syria that’s sending refugees. Many more come from Iraq and Afghanistan, two other countries shattered by bungled Western military interventions. Then there are the refugees from Libya. A country the media and political establishment would rather forget because it represents another disastrous military decision. Actually, it’s not just Libyan refugees. It’s refugees from all of Africa who are using Libya as a transit point to reach Europe.

Before his overthrow by NATO, Muammar Gaddafi had an agreement with Italy, which is directly to Libya’s north, across the Mediterranean Sea. Gaddafi agreed to prevent refugees heading for Europe from using Libya as a transit point. It was an arrangement that worked. So it’s no shocker that when NATO helped a coalition of ambitious rebels overthrow the Gaddafi government, the refugee floodgates opened.
When there’s war, there are refugees. It’s a predictable outcome.

It’s like kicking a bees’ nest and being surprised that bees fly out. Nobody should be surprised when that happens. And nobody should be surprised that people are fleeing war zones in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

If Western governments didn’t want a refugee crisis, they shouldn’t have been so eager to topple those governments and destabilize those countries. The refugees should camp out in the backyards of the individuals who run those governments. I also have to mention the Saudis. They were very much involved in the Libyan war. They’ve also devoted themselves to ousting the Assad government in Syria, for geopolitical and sectarian reasons.

Then there’s the war in Yemen that the Saudis have sponsored. It’s another mess the media doesn’t discuss often. But it will likely produce even more refugees. The Saudis make no secret about not welcoming refugees, even though the Kingdom is a primary instigator of the wars that are forcing people to flee their homelands. One reason is the Saudis don’t want more people leeching off their welfare system, especially amid budget crunches from lower oil prices.

This brings up another interesting point. For the first time in decades, observers are calling into question the viability of the Saudi currency peg of 3.75 riyals per US dollar. The Saudi government spends a ton of money on welfare to keep its citizens sedated. But with lower oil prices cutting deep into government revenue, there’s less money to spend on welfare. Then there’s the cost of the wars in Yemen and Syria.

There’s a serious crunch in the Saudi budget. They’ve only been able to stay afloat by draining their foreign exchange reserves. That threatens their currency peg. The next clue that there’s trouble is Saudi officials telling the media that the currency peg is fine and there’s nothing to worry about. An official government denial is almost always a sign of the opposite. It’s like the old saying…“believe nothing until it has been officially denied.”

If there were a convenient way to short the Saudi riyal, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Don’t Give the Welfare State a Pass

It’s no coincidence that the refugees are flowing to the countries with the most generous welfare benefits, especially Germany and the Scandinavian nations. If there weren’t so many freebies in these countries, there wouldn’t be so many refugees showing up to collect them.

The whole refugee crisis was easily predictable. It was the foreseeable consequence of shortsighted interventions in the Middle East and the welfare state policies of nearby Europe. Instead of facing facts, blaming it all on a scheme to subvert the West conveniently deflects any responsibility from the authors of the mess.

If the individuals who run Western governments really wanted to solve the refugee problem, they would throttle way back on welfare state policies and then stay out of the Middle East free for all. It’s really as simple as that. But don’t count on the mainstream media to figure this out. They effectively operate as an organ of the State. I bet they’ll keep prescribing more of the same bad medicine that caused this crisis to begin with.

This will help to cover the tracks of the real perpetrators, and it will obscure other real problems. I expect the media to ramp up the “blame the foreigner” sentiment, as it helps the US and EU governments distract the anger of their citizens from the sputtering economy and the shrinking of their civil liberties. From the politicians’ perspective, it’s a win win. But it’s a lose lose for citizens hoping for accountable government.

And this brings up another uncomfortable truth for Americans and Europeans. The way the political and economic winds are blowing, things could get much worse. Central banks around the globe have created the biggest financial bubble in world history. The social and political implications of this bubble bursting are even more dangerous than the financial consequences.

An economic depression and currency inflation (perhaps hyperinflation) are very much in the cards. These things rarely lead to anything but bigger government, less freedom, and shrinking prosperity. Sometimes they lead to much worse.

One day the shoe could be on the other foot. We could see American and European refugees fleeing to South America or other havens to escape the problems in their home countries. It would be an ironic twist.
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The article was originally published at internationalman.com.

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