Bernie Ecclestone is a gnomish Brit ex-grease monkey who is my neighbor in Gstaad, the small alpine Swiss village that once upon a time was the Mecca of the old rich and titled, now slowly turning into the playground of the nouveau riche and vulgar.  I’ve often written about Bernie because, for a very short man, he has a very long reach.  About ten years ago he bought a beautiful old inn, a Gstaad landmark used by both locals and tourists, and turned it into a chic boutique-type of restaurant-hotel, whose prices only the very rich can afford.  I wrote about it in the London Spectator, and Bernie answered that it was not his fault my finances were not up to it.  Par for the course.  He recently purchased yet another chalet for his daughters, both ladies experts at knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.  Ecclestone is a multibillionaire, having made his fortune as owner of Formula One Grand Prix racing, whatever that means.  Ecclestone has been in the news lately because of a remark he recently made: “I think Europe is finished.  It will be a good place for tourism but little else.  Europe is a thing of the past.”

This is where the Brussels gang comes in.  The bureaucrooks of Brussels have begun an advertising campaign that aims to encourage young Europeans to take charge of their economic future by starting businesses.  They hired the M&C Saatchi advertising company and have shot an ad in London institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library, highlighting displays featuring thinkers of the past, including Plato, Galileo, and Darwin.  A narrator reads Bernie’s message while a girl in a glass takes a hammer and shatters the glass.  “That is not my future,” she says.

The not-so-subtle message is that Europe is moving forward, and should not be consigned to a museum of economic and technological history.  So far so good, but like everything that Brussels preaches, totally false.  In fact it’s so false, I for once am on Bernie’s side.  To be an entrepreneur in Europe nowadays is a very dangerous business.  There is a rigid labor market across Europe that makes it extremely costly to hire and fire workers.  Even worse, the banks are not lending any money.  A friend of mine, a karate instructor, wanted to hire a couple of assistants so he could provide more classes in his rented studio throughout the day.  One of them turned out to be a total dunce.  My friend could not fire him, is stuck with him, and is losing business because of him.  The French state is behind the dunce.  So much for the entrepreneurial spirit.

The structural barriers erected by the very same Brussels gang that now call for more start-ups are what make the whole thing such a bad joke.  Immigration policies that attract uneducated poor people from North and Central Africa do not help.  Tax rates that discourage risk, ditto.  Who in France would risk his livelihood in order to start a business that, if successful, might see him paying 75 percent to the French taxman?  The French are unpleasant, but stupid they are not.  Job creation has been killed by excessive Brussels legislation, yet these same clowns are now paying for an expensive advertising campaign—with our tax euros, of course—urging the suckers to come up with more vigorous investments.  It’s bit like Al Capone taking out an ad advocating more police in Chicago.

And it gets worse.  Brussels now wants more European oversight over the budgets of national governments.  It wants a single supervisory mechanism for eurozone banks and more power for the European Parliament.  It claims that the biggest danger to Europe is rising nationalism and populism—i.e., people are waking up to the Brussels dictatorship and demanding more control over their lives by their own kind.

To illustrate the kind of arrogance practiced by these crypto-dictators, and their total dismissal of European peoples’ aspirations of self-determination, I refer you to Greece, a moribund nation in hock to the European Union, and what the latest Greek government is doing.  Antonis Samaras, the prime minister of the three-party coalition, talks a good game trying to prevail on his E.U. partners to give him more time.  In the meantime he has squeezed the Greeks as much as it is possible by cutting pensions.  What he has totally failed to do is to eliminate corruption and fire civil servants from the bloated state sector that is mainly responsible for the situation Greece finds herself in.  Starting a business in Greece means getting around a very labyrinthine bureaucracy that is possible to negotiate only by bribing officials, the very same officials whom Samaras has failed to get rid of.  In the meantime he has bled poor Greeks dry, leading to suicides and despair.  The arrogant Brussels gang knows this but will do nothing about it.  Keeping the euro and the union intact is all that matters.  The wishes of the electorate are immaterial.  Such are the joys of being a European nowadays, and there will be more to come.