The economist needs to change... How the right has become discredited by this crisis and how this shows by the increasingly desperate articles in the economist magazine.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15663362&source=hptextfeature
The economist needs to change...

I think the www.economist.com has reached the limits of its ideology, because we live in the world that applied the economists' creed since 1979 and its now plain to see that from a european perspective, europe has lost by following the advice of the Chicagoschool/Economist/FTet al nexus.

In the name of free trade witht he US, we europeans have been sold:

1. crap sub-prime mortgages as saving financial products and lost money on those
2. american shares that seem extremely bubbly to me
3. we are lobbied to buy shoddy and diseased US food (e.g. chlorine bathed sick chickens etc..)
4. finally got the stupid credit card bug of not spending what we earn (worst case the UK)
5. we are being told what to do with our holidays and lives (i think anglosaxons don't really like their families and therefore keep themselves busy with work to avoid family life...) Personally I take many many weeks paid holiday a year and i dont work for the state. My life has meaning beyond work..
6. american-style politics of a presidential type (e.g. Blair) which shows what a mess it brought about in the UK creating 2 right-wing parties to choose from - hardly real democratic choice, its more like a "managed" political system - what the ancient greeks would recognise as an oligarchy....
7. US-based and influenced IMF emanating advice consistently bad and inappropriate but always suitable for US exporters' interests.
8. US-style healthcare although it is such a colossal disaster no civilised country wants to touch it and even the US is trying to move away from it via Obama., The economist was singing its virtues about a year and a half ago in a nauseating series of articles "special reports" which i would call advertorials.

I firmly believe that the pendulum needs to shift back quite a bit because the economist has become a religious publication in the sense that it doesn't change its mind when circumstances change. It is starting to sound like those breathless self-congratulatory and mindlessly campaigning press releases by US corporations.

I can personally testify to the fact that for most people as other comments described as well, the way of life in most european countries being infinitely more pleasant and purposeful than in the UK and the US (i have lived in all of them).

i can't help feeling that either economists' writers are rather sad individuals that should get out more, find a purpose in life and certainly consume far less...

(i am off for some cycling on the danube between Vienna and Bratislava and a coffee and croissants with my gf as i ve been given friday off by my employer because i did some good work
-gdp ticker counts this as minus... if i got a bonus and spent it on child labour employing products from China GDP ticker would say Plus- ergo stupid indicator and moronic free market zealots).

get a life seriously... Nobody thinks Thatcher was brilliant anymore, Adam Smith railed about morality in our financial interactions much more than he mentioned the invisible hand.

Anyone can grow if they inflate huge speculative bubbles... its fraud... like the anglo economies and poor Spain that now has concreted over all its beaches to create empty villas because it tried to be Britain through a housing based economy.