Makes me think of what Heinlein said, from memory: “Stupidity is the only capital crime. The punishment is always death. There is no appeal.”
For Italy, multilateral globalism, plus socialism, equals death.
Italy’s in dire need of help.
Its health care system is collapsing. The coronavirus has put the whole country in quarantine. There are now 15,000 cases, along with 1,018 deaths, the last 24 hours bringing in 188 more. The casualty count is the highest outside China. And it’s spreading fast. Until a few days ago, the problem was concentrated in the north. Now, it has spread throughout the whole country.
Anyone with a heart can feel pity and an urge to help them. They need help, bad.
But don’t go asking the European Union.
Turns out this open-borders globalist set-up is stiffing the Italians in their hour of need:
First, the EU created the problem by failing to shut down their borders with China, enabling its spread into Italy in the first place. While President Trump was acting swiftly to protect America from the lethal virus, the European Union was saying there was no crisis and calling Trump a xenophobe.
Now, with Italy hit hard based on that hate-Trump ‘logic’, its medical system is overwhelmed. Its doctors and nurses are exhausted. There’s not enough equipment, there’s not enough supplies, and the patients keep coming. The Italians are appealing for help with masks, surgical equipment, doctors, anything that will enable them to get through it and save human lives — and the EU is not giving it.
David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner (hat tip: Instapundit) has a must-read column on how the EU is leaving Italy to fend for itself in its hour of need.
Maurizio Massari, Italy’s permanent representative to the European Union, wrote an opinion piece for Politico Europe Tuesday evening publicly shaming fellow EU states for their failure to help, and once again asking them to come together. Instead, European countries are banning the exportation of face masks and other medical equipment needed to deal with the crisis. Germany’s health minister, quoted by Politico, argued that this was necessary: “The market is such at present that masks are not going where [they’re most] urgently needed, it’s where people pay most money for them.”
This is absurd. First of all, if Germany’s government is really so worried about masks not getting where they’re needed (as opposed to covering its own backside), they can donate masks to the Italians, can’t they? This complaint about profiteering is really just cover for their own fearful selfishness.
Why is that a problem? Because the European Union is supposed to be all about lovey-doviness, nations giving of their surplus to help others in the name of the greater good. Everybody sharing, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Helping the poor out, putting people first (remember how Angela Merkel ‘volunteered’ the rest of Europe to take in some of the migrant masses she herself invited in? — I invite, you pay?) But so much more virtuous than that cowboy regime across the pond.
Freddoso continues:
And it may be perfectly understandable for Germany to want to protect its own national interest in a time of crisis, but it runs counter to the entire concept of the EU that we’ve been hearing so much about during the debate over Brexit. Member states are supposed to benefit by putting aside their own selfish needs. French President Emmanuel Macron has [called] for an even more united post-Brexit EU. What happened to that? Right now, his government is seizing control of masks throughout France. I haven’t seen anything about them ending up in Italy.
And as Freddoso notes, all the Italians are getting is empty EU words, nothing more. So much for all that ‘sharing.’
Everyone’s a conservative about things they know best.
The hard reality here is that nations act in their own self-interest whether they say so or not. That so much propaganda to the contrary has been mouthed by the European Union in the name of preserving its stateless bureaucracy, and is often believed by local citizens, is a sad story. Up until now, the Italians had to have been confident their association with the EU would help them. Turns out that is a load of hooey, it hasn’t. That’s reason enough to leave the EU as if the restive nation didn’t already have enough such reason. Open borders for disease, closed borders for help with disease, what a bargain. One hopes the Italians will get wise to this and finally pull the plug.
That’s not the only thing that’s being discredited, though.
Globalism of this EU sort, as it turns out, is absolutely lethal when combined with local socialism.
Italy has socialized medicine, the kind Bernie Sanders seeks to push on America, leaving the country way less prepared to handle the pandemic than countries with free market health care systems.
Confirmed cases vs. Critical care beds pic.twitter.com/UFQQBWPEqq
— Shahin Vallée (@Shahinvallee) March 14, 2020
h/t GR