Discussion of a United States of Europe wrt the USA.
econobog101
The anti-European Sinn
Dirk Ehnts | Berlin School for Economics and Law
I disagree with the Europeanizers. A democratically decided political union must precede a hierarchically imposed economic union, or there will be political disunity and possible disaster down the line, judging from the history of the US. The potential for disunity is much greater in Europe given the ethnic, historical, cultural, and language differences — conditions that the US did not have to contend with at its inception and it still fought a Civil War to preserve the union. That war never really ended, since the militarily-imposed resolution was never really accepted by all parties.
2 comments:
If the US Secessionists or the Flemish, Catalonian, and Scotch secession movements are any indication, the majority of the citizens of these countries are not in favor of further political consolidation. One could rant on about who benefits and what the individual citizens lose but growth of The State does not appear to have a popular mandate.
A great article by Dirk Ehnts.
In fact, right-wingers such as Sinn have come out with hysterical objections against TARGET2 because they have discovered a big and (for them) dangerous secret: that, in practice this well-designed "payments and clearance system" already guarantees that Europe may become an automatic transfer union if the periphery countries so much as will it.
As I have said in previous comments, a government that is also owner of a commercial bank may regain monetary sovereignty by issuing bonds to said bank and then use the deposits to pay off creditors abroad. The previous debt will be dumped forever in the TARGET2 balances, a solved problem never to be heard of again.
The missing link until now has been the ignorance, incompetence and lack of "cojones" of the southern European governments. They have proved to be either ignorant or incompetent and at any rate incapable of defending their peoples' interests within the framework of the existing rules of the eurozone. They should all be fired by the electorates in the next round of elections.
Then new governments will be able to suspend austerity while using the TARGET2 system to good effect. This will be the only possible way to save the eurozone, btw. Failure to implement this solution will likely lead to a complete breakdown of the currency area in the medium term, because the populations will simply refuse to continue taking the bitter and quite unnecessary pill of austerity after a soon-to-come tipping point of suffering is reached.
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