It sounds like, rather than a United States of Europe, there will be a Soviet Union of Europe.
Well said. Autolykos
Solzhenitsin foresaw that (“a Soviet Union with well stocked stores”) and he also predicted it was doomed to fail.
These expectations are what will rip Europe apart: people want both Socialism AND goods/services only capitalism can provide. Like Lew Rockwell wrote in Triumph of Socialism people have already forgotten what life was like in the Soviet Block.
My roommate at the Uni was the son of a Greek professor. He said one day his father took a visiting colleague from the USSR on a sightseeing tour of Attica in his car, a VolksWagen sedan. The Soviet professor was amazed: he had never seen such a well engineered, well put together car in all his life. Not even the big Tchaika used by the Politburo and the KGB were so good. He was even more amazed when he learned this car was so affordable and you didn’t have to wait over a year for it. He just could not believe it.
Yet lessons such as this have been forgotten. People think they can have both a cradle to grave nanny State AND iPhones, affordable VW cars and reliable refirgerators. Good luck with that.
Kakugo, I think it’s because 1) people desire certainty (even though it’s impossible to achieve), and 2) people have been fed illusions of certainty by “their” governments.
Read an insightful take on the Euro situation recently.
It was that: Germany will finally achieve by its pocketbook what it has failed to achieve with three centuries of warface: domination over Europe.
Sowell put it well recently,
“When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy them, and only in the short run.”
Democracy is the root flaw. It has run its course. We’re witnessing the cul-de-sac that is Bismarckian political methodology. End of the road, and doomed to fail by its internal contradictions. We have Obama socializing health-care while running trillion dollar deficits, and broke California passing a bill to do high-seed rail that won’t be high-speed.
We really need a libertarian state to escape into.
Read an insightful take on the Euro situation recently.
It was that: Germany will finally achieve by its pocketbook what it has failed to achieve with three centuries of warface [sic]: domination over Europe.
Of all possible takes on the European situation, none gets it more totally backwards than that retarded statement.
If you want to understand what’s happening there, read The Tragedy of the Euro, by Bagus, available free at mises.org.
Trust me, I have no special affection for Germany, but the situation is exactly the opposite. That “insight” is like Count Dracula saying, as he bites into the pretty girl yet again, “That girl is out to bleed me dry”.
Sorry, I cannot educate you in a short post, nor do I think you want to be. But the interested reader should read Bagus’ short book, then come back and have a good laugh at that foolish “insight”.
Till then.
From the book:
“The project of the Euro has been pushed by European
socialists to enhance their dream of a central European state.
But the project is about to fail. The collapse is far from being a coincidence.”
When has the collapse of a statist program ever led to its end? The failure of any government program only means they need more money to fix the problem, or more central control, more regulations–something like that.
Crisis turns into political will–crisis is what politicians want!
Enough fiscal crisis, and France and Germany will be able to institute their idea of a federal law like the US has, with federal sovereignty over all. The austerity measures and loans are already being used to extract budget sovereignty from the various nation states. And that sovereignty will be primarily under German and French control, just like they’ve always wanted.