Leo Umilio at The Idle Gazette:
There is a particular expression that crosses the face of a certain kind of American visitor at about a quarter to noon on a Tuesday, in a café in Cluj or Lyon or Trieste, when he looks up from his phone and registers that the three men at the next table, all of working age, all apparently solvent, have been sitting over the ruins of their espressos for upwards of an hour, discussing nothing that could be called actionable, and showing no signs of concluding. It is not envy, or not only envy. Envy would be simpler. The expression contains a measure of genuine moral offense, the look of a churchgoer who has wandered into the wrong building and found the congregation worshipping incorrectly. The word for what he feels, if we are being precise, is contempt.
The contempt is usually rationalized in economic terms, and the rationalization is where everyone, defenders and prosecutors alike, goes wrong. The prosecution counts vacation days, early retirements, the thirty-five-hour week, the August in which entire countries go conspicuously dark, and concludes that Europe is a continent living beyond its means, subsidizing its naps with borrowed money. The defense counts the same things and calls them civilization. Both sides are doing accounting, and the accounting misses the asset entirely.
More here.
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