Hmmm, on the other hand, the article by Jake Blumgart reviewing Thomas Geoghegan is remarkably stupid. Then again, the thesis of Geoghegan's book is remarkably stupid, so I suppose Blumgart is merely parroting.
Merely the ten thousandth iteration of a middle-class North American intellectual fantasy about a mythical European welfare state and powerful German trade unions.
This is a real howler:
"Germany’s workers have an influence the U.S. labor movement can only dream of. The one-sided class war of the 1980s would have been unimaginable here."
Not the *most* idiotic thing I've read in the realm of Anglo-liberal daydreams about Fantasy-Europe, but pretty close. It's unreasonable to expect American leftists to be up on the day-to-day transactions of German political life, but the fucking Hartz IV reforms got coverage in the Financial Times and the Economist! There is no excuse for not knowing about things like that! Certainly not if one is going to make bold declarative statements about socio-political reality on the continent.
Ursula von der Leyen (that's the labor and social minister of the current government, for those who care) is about to reveal the new method for calculating the Hartz IV payouts on Monday. Pretty much everyone is speculating that the government will be changing it's method of calculation in order to be able to implement cuts. That means that the pittance of 359 Euro that Hartz IV recipients are forced to survive on monthly will be even lower.
Meanwhile, there is still no minimum wage in Germany, meaning those trapped in Germany's booming low-wage sector still have no alternative but to apply for supplementary Hartz IV in order to eke by. By doing so, I repeat, they lose elementary civil rights such as the right to live where they please, or leave town without notifying a caseworker.
I swear to God, every time I hear some mealy-mouthed American liberal ejaculate about his fantasy European welfare state, I want to punch him in the fucking mouth.