Gypsy Stories

There was a very popular teacher at the school my son is attending here in Porto. She was young, intelligent, empathetic and in every way what kids like in a teacher. It was also clear that she was genuinely interested in and fond of the children in her classes. However, she is no longer teaching at my son's school, and I only see her every now and again when I happen to deliver my son to school at the same time she delivers her daughter.

She has received a scholarship from the EU to write a paper on gypsies, and the prestige and money associated with this was evidently enough to sway her away from her teaching position at the school.

I'm not going to pretend I know all the details about her assignment, or why she accepted it, but I'm pretty confident that this is a classic example of how direct interference from governments makes everybody poorer and less content than they would otherwise have been.

Here we had a teacher doing a fine job in every way, and very much enjoying her work, that got an offer she could not refuse. The money she would make by writing a paper on gypsies and their lives in Portugal was more than she could make as a teacher. In addition, there is no doubt a good deal of prestige associated with the paper, and its purpose harmonized with the teacher's left leaning sympathies.

The stated goal of the EU when it comes to gypsies is to have them fully integrated into "the system". Living outside the system, gypsies do not pay any taxes. In the eyes of the progressive left, this is synonymous to being helpless and lost. But the reality of it is that the system has in fact always been the enemy of gypsies, especially in progressive nations such as Norway. Even the most superficial study of that nation's progressive past will produce mountains of evidence for the evils that progressives have hoist upon gypsies in the name of assimilation.

However, Portugal was under the rule of Salazar during the worst of the progressive era. He was a reactionary dictator who proudly proclaimed his anti-progressive stance. While the rest of Europe was busy persecuting gypsies, breaking up families, forcefully sterilizing and lobotomizing them, and even killing them right out, gypsies were allowed to continue their lives outside the system in Portugal. It is therefore excusable that a young progressive in Portugal would be relatively unaware of the decidedly sinister undertone of an EU program to assimilate gypsies into the system.

An EU grant carries a lot of prestige with it, but I suspect that the young teacher has figured out by now that the paper she is writing is at best useless, and at worst an excuse for some serious mischief. The paper, if it carries the desired conclusion, will be used as a weapon in some internal power play in the bureaucratic halls of the EU machinery. If it carries the "wrong" conclusion, it will be discarded and ignored. No-one in politics cares about truth or knowledge. All that matters is power.

However, the money to fund the paper does not come out of a vacuum. It was brought in in the form of taxes. People in productive employment had to give up a share of their earnings to finance the grant and the bureaucracy that administered it. The reason teachers are paid as badly as they are is in part due to the fact that money is siphoned off of their productive work in order to give away as grants.

The result of this is that good teachers, doing productive and meaningful work, are being burdened by taxation and at the same time lured away from their position by financially attractive yet meaningless assignments. Instead of having happy, prosperous teachers, we end up with over-burdened teachers and unhappy researchers.

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