I can’t recall where I read this, so I haven’t any citation.  But it is an interesting train of thought.

An immigrant is someone who comes to a new country and adopts it’s laws and culture.  This doesn’t mean immigrants give up their culture or attitudes entirely.  It just means they conform to the general population and to the specific laws of their new home.

Settlers are entirely different.  They keep the laws and culture of their original homeland and do not conform to the laws and culture of their new home.  The reject the old adage “When in Rome do as the Romans do.”

Europeans settled North America.  They were not immigrants.  They brought their own laws and culture and eventually displaced the native inhabitants.  Often by force. 

So the question is are Muslims who move to a new country immigrants or settlers?  It’s hard to tell sometimes.  The majority appear to be immigrants.  Many become citizens in good standing in their new homeland, including the United States.

But many do not appear to want to conform to the mores and laws of their new countries.  They bring with them intact the laws of their religion and reject secular laws that are adhered to by the majority of citizens in their adopted country.  These folks are not immigrants.  They are settlers.

There’s something of a Diaspora going on with Muslims in recent years.  Millions of them have fled from the oppression and strife in their homelands.  Most have fled to nearby European countries where the question of whether these new arrivals are immigrants or settlers is far more than merely an intellectual question.

Entire Muslim communities in France, Spain, England and elsewhere live under their religious laws, not the secular laws of their host countries.  They reject their host’s laws.  In fact some have successfully demanded that they be allowed to live under their own laws.

One wonders what the reaction will be in the United States if Muslim immigrants reveal themselves to be, in truth, settlers?

On the far left it’s the Communist troglodytes.  On the far right it’s the troglodyte libertarians.  In between are the rest of us:  The vast majority.

On the far left it’s the public ownership of the means of production.  On the far right it’s the “If you don’t have it, you’re not supposed to have it,” crew.

And in the middle is the rest of us:  The vast majority.

History is basically the continual attempt to find a decent middle ground where the lives of the majority are improved.  Or at least that’s been the history of Europe and it’s offshoots in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.

Understanding how this struggle has moved forward, or backwards as the case may be, is important.  But outside of an academic education in history, it’s difficult for the average citizen to get a quick overview that’s understandable.

Enter Australian economist John Quiggin who is working on the final chapter in what will probably become a book titled “Zombie Economics.”

At his blogsite here Quiggin explains:

“I’m on the final chapter of my long-promised Zombie Economics, dealing with ideas refuted by the Global Financial Crisis. My target this time is privatisation – more precisely, the idea that privatisation will always yield an improvement over public ownership, and, therefore that market liberalism is an advance on the mixed economy that developed in the during the post-1945 long boom.”

Beezer here.  That being said, the latest Quiggin post gives a real quick, understandable explanation of the back and forth between government economic influence and private market influence, beginning before World War II.

Here are a few examples taken from this post.

“The ‘mixed economy’ in which public provision of a wide range of services and economic infrastructure, such as telecommunications and electricity networks, coexisted with a largely capitalist market economy was one of the most striking features of the political and economic settlement that emerged in Western economies after 1945. Public ownership was not new. Governments in many countries had played a role in providing infrastructure, social welfare systems and services such as health and education. But, before World War II these measures had generally been seen, by supporters and critics alike, as steps towards full-scale socialism, defined in traditional terms as the elimination of private ownership of the means of production…

The experience of the Depression and World War II produced a fundamental shift in thinking about the roles of governments and markets, described by Sheri Berman as ‘the social democratic moment’. Rejecting both 19th century classical liberalism, and the mechanistic determinism of orthodox Marxism, social democrats saw themselves, in the words of Australian historian as ‘civilising capitalism’. From the Swedish ‘Folkhemmet’ (people’s home) to the British reforms based on the Beveridge Report to Roosevelt’s New Deal and Four Freedoms, social democrats put forward a vision of a society in which markets and business enterprise played a central role, but one subordinate to the needs of a just society. In addition to Keynesian macroeconomic management and the social policies of the welfare state, this vision required governments to make investments in the physical and economic infrastructure needed to ensure prosperity.”

Beezer again.  But springing primarily from the economic theories of Milton Friedman, political leaders such as President Ronald Reagan and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher reversed the trend of government ownership and regulation.  They started the trend of privatizing many public utilities that even today dominates the philosophical approach of, as an example, the Republican Party. 

From Quiggin:

“The large-scale privatisation of publicly-owned enterprises in the 1980s and 1990s played a big role in promoting the triumphalist claims of market liberals. Commentators and thinktanks rushed to conflate the (real but manageable) financial difficulties of long-established public infrastructure services in countries like the UK, New Zealand and Australia with the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the stagnation of North Korea.

Public ownership of infrastructure was seen as a relic of the past, doomed to vanish as governments rushed to sell off assets. Having claimed victory in the infrastructure sector, market liberals turned their attention to the core of the welfare state with proposals for privatisation of health services, prisons and the school system. In the US, the most ambitious assault on the institutions of the New Deal era was the proposal, pushed hard by the Bush Administration, to privatise Social Security.

Few would have predicted that, a decade or so later, governments would be debating, and in some cases undertaking, the nationalisation of such iconic capitalist enterprises as Citigroup, Bank of America and General Motors. Although these rescue operations mostly involve only temporary public ownership, they make the rhetoric of the 1990s look absurd. And they raise the question of whether some or all of the privatisations of past decades should be reversed.”

Beezer again.  And so it continues.  The back and forth tug of war.  The attempt to gain real improvement amongst the hardworking majority by balancing the public power of democratic government with the private power of capitalism. 

It appears the private power part, after 30 years of ascendency, will be pulled back in a bit.  As it should be given the destructive power it has displayed, worldwide, the past year and a half. 

Someone somewhere once observed that Europeans work to live, whereas Americans live to work.

In Europe four weeks of paid vacation is mandatory.  In the private economy in the US, four weeks of vacation is a luxury for the majority of employees who normally don’t get paid anything unless they are working.

In much of Europe labor wages are set nationally and labor unions are still dominant.   In the US fewer than 12% of labor is organized.  The remaining labor has no say when it comes to deciding the distribution of revenues.

Most of Europeans have universal health care in one form or another.  In many European countries there is no bill at all when medical services are used.   In the US there is no universal health care.  Yet European medical care costs less than it does in America and by most measurements of general health Europeans are healthier than their American counterparts.

Which is not to say Europeans don’t pay for these benefits.  European tax rates are stiffly progressive compared to those in the US.   For whatever reasons, Europeans emphasize benefits for all their populations as a national priority.   In the US this impulse does not gain the same priority.

Why are these attitudes so different?  After all, both Europe and the US enjoy relative prosperity compared to much of the world.  How can Europe afford paid vacations, livable union wages and universal health care whereas the US cannot?

From this writer’s perspective, the US can obviously afford the same benefits for its citizens if Europeans can.  That’s what makes the difference in attitude so important.

In the US we live to work.  In Europe it’s the other way around.

There’s this basic concept that free markets will arrive at a particular, mysteriously efficient, price on any product or service.   All sorts of costs are included in these prices which result in a fair and willing exchange between buyer and seller.   This is a process in any exchange actually, whether it’s a free market or not.  It’s just that recent human experience shows that free markets are best at facilitating these critical exchanges.

Which is not to say that free market pricing is perfect.  In fact, free market pricing has an achilles heel, a fatal flaw.  That flaw is the cost called “risk.”  Free market pricing in today’s complicated world dramatically underprices risk.   If we don’t address this flaw, it will kill us all. 

Now that’s a risk.

Everyone now has a better understanding of this problem because of the disastrous economic consequences of mis-pricing risk on mortgage securities.  That pricing mistake has negatively affected the entire globe and the real cost of the mistake is yet to be fully realized.  Reality is now giving us the accurate bill–the one that includes the cost called “risk.”  And it’s much more than the free market price.

Consider the human impact on our planet.  We now better understand it can be fatally negative if we don’t change our ways.  Pollution, scarcity of resources, extermination of species, global warming etc. etc.:  All symptoms of failing to include risk in the bill we pay.

Thomas Friedman bluntly expressed this problem in his book “Hot, Flat, and Crowded”:  “It is not pay now or pay later.  It is pay now, or there will be no later.”

So let’s be specific.  Take the price of a gallon of milk.  If we know that the free market price is, say, $1.95 the question is what’s the real price with risk baked in?  Milk comes from cows which are fed from food that is raised with the help of fertilizers.  Fertilizers boost production of food which reduces that cost, which in turn reduces the cost of the cows, which in turn reduces the cost of milk. 

But fertilizers can harm your health as you drink the milk.  Fertilizers also pollute riverways as rain runoff.  And that harms fish and other aquatic life in ways we are only now beginning to better comprehend.  Milk cows are only productive for about 4 years.  They are then slaughtered and become another source of our food: Beef.  Same problem, different stage.  The beef, just like the milk, contains fertilizer components that can, and do, harm our health. 

All natural food products which, purportedly, do not contain these harmful chemicals cost more.  A gallon of this milk costs $3.20, 60% plus more than the free market price.   That’s a huge jump in price, but it is an accurate indication of the real cost of risk as of today.

The positive aspect of paying for risk today is that it will reduce risk, and therefore the cost of risk, tomorrow.  Chemically clean milk and beef won’t create the health issues that are being created today.  Chemically clean farm fields won’t pollute and destroy aquatic life.  Free market pricing has the opposite effect.  Because it does not include accurate risk pricing, the risk will compound and increase and tomorrow’s free market price will be greater.   The $3.20 all natural milk price will go down.  The free market price will only go up.  We’ve learned from our mortgage experience of late that everyone eventually gets the real bill.

Now substitute “energy” for milk and you understand Friedman’s statement.   The true cost of energy is whatever it costs to produce “all natural” energy.  If the true cost for that energy is, as an example, the equivalent of $8 per gallon gasoline with today’s technology, then that is what we should be paying now.

We cannot kick this can down the road any longer.  If free market pricing won’t recognize the real cost of risk, then the government has to impose that cost on the free market price.  Europe does this through taxes on energy.  That’s why Europe has a well developed train system and is far ahead of America in using “all natural” sustainable energy.  It’s also why Europe’s health care costs are lower, and their health care systems more available to all. 

Europe’s risks are going lower.  Ours are going higher.  It’s time, as President Obama is fond of pointing out, that we accept our responsibilities.  It’s time we start paying to reduce the price of risk.