True, I was overstating my case to make a point, but I did find Anarchist Cain’s earlier comment quite hostile, and you did seem to support it. Since most people are not anarchocapitalists and are certainly not born ones, but a lot of people including many on this forum are sympathetic or share many of the same ideals as anarchists towards freedom; it may not best serve your ends, or at least what I believe to be your ends; by telling them they don’t belong here.
Apparently David Friedman wouldn’t be welcome here either, as he adheres to the Chicago School of economics [*-)]
That, and Objectivists like Dr Reisman.
Well, this thread has been quiet a long time but I wanted to revisit it because of the current EU financial crises. Interesting today are two articles in the British media:
The eurozone crisis: if the single currency can be saved, deeper political union is inevitable
Eurozone crisis: What would a break-up look like?
“The leaders who will meet in Brussels on Thursday still have the power to decide whether this crisis is going to end with much greater integration and burden-sharing between the governments of the eurozone - or a dramatic break-up. But they are increasingly losing control of the timing.”
This I think confirms Mises’ argument in “Bureaucracy” (see post here). The euro fiscal crisis has exposed the weakness of an economic unit that is politically fragmented, It is forcing either the degree of political integration to catch up with the degree of economic integration or a breakup of the economic entity.
I would remove/end the European political leadership/apparatus. Allow for the EU currency to continue and keep the economic trade agreement principles. Which is what it was originally set out to be, well it was the justification for starting it. If it continues it will only lead to a European dictatorship that would go as far as attacking its own member states in to compliance? I do not think that the model of a European currency is viable. Having so many individual countries with their own governments under one currency does not work. Too many governments that like to spend money and create debt. This will lead to the richer countries paying more than others and eventually it will collapse. There should be competing currencies within Europe. So a swiss franc and gbp should be legal tender everywhere in Europe.
So ending the EUSSR would not have to be the end of a “free trade understanding” between european states. There could still exist a free market across the borders without a unified currency and unified political dictatorship.
Actually the EU has only one chance to survive: go back to the so called “Liberal” proposal which ended up being watered down by the Treaty of Rome of 1957 and ended up being progressively replaced by so called “Socialist” proposal. Bagus’s book clearly outlines these two proposals. All attempts at European unification under a single leadership in the past have failed miserably, no matter how strong the bureaucracy and the armies trying to impose it.
Trying to combine together the two ideas for a common European home (free trade on one side and a progressively stronger centralized government on the other) may have sounded like a good compromise back at the times but as is always the case with middle of the road solutions the worst part progressively took over. It means the benefits of a free market are being steadily eroded by a meddling and bloated central government which is effectively aiming at replacing the free market with yet another version of the Soviet centralized economy. Back in the days the planners in Moscow decided what was to be produced in the factories of each country of the Warsaw Pact out of complicated reasoning which, more often than not, was just a cover for their whims. We are already seeing shades of this same procedure in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which decides how much milk or how many oranges a member State can produce. How long will it be before we’ll have a Common Industrial Policy, to set how many cars or industrial bores each country can manufacture?
The benefit of having different tax systems, legal systems, monetary policies, etc. is much greater than the benefit of having a customs union.
EDIT: didn’t notice it was an old thread.
Well, if Mises was right in “Bureaucracy” then it is not really a question of choosing whether to couple economic and political unification, more a case of one innevitably following the other. And as we are now seeing with the single European currency, they are now learning that the hard way.