What has become of you Europe [and of you the whole Western world]? Don't be such a defeatist!

I just saw a photo of your Britain’s David Cameron, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Holland’s Mark Rutte and Sweden’s Fredrik Reinfeldt, in a row boat, in a little lake, probably surrounded by thousands of life guards… wearing life vests.

The same boat used years ago by Tage Erlander (Sweden) and Nikita Khrushchev… without life vests.

And all I could think of was “Would Winston Churchill (or Putin) ever want to be photographed in a little row boat, on a small lake, wearing a life vest?

What has become of you Europe? In Swedish churches we used to sing psalms praying “God make us daring!”

PS. A “decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood…Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?" Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard University 1978

PS. I went to bed in a world that knew risk taking was the oxygen of development… and I woke up to one where regulators, for bank capital (equity) requirements, had decreed much higher risk weights for loans to small businesses and entrepreneurs than for loans managed by bureaucrats... and its Academia says nothing.

PS. Born 1950, during my first 30 years, we were mostly instructed to look out for risks… caveat emptor. Thereafter we were told: 

“Don’t worry, we, your government (and assorted unelected nannies), we will do that for you.”