Thomas Piketty — A New Deal for Europe

The far right has surged in just a few years from 15 percent to 30 percent of the vote in France, and now has the support of up to 40 percent in a number of districts. Many factors conspired to produce this result: rising unemployment and xenophobia, a deep disappointment over the left’s record in running the government, the feeling that we’ve tried everything and it’s time to experiment with something new. These are the consequences of the disastrous handling of the financial meltdown that began in the United States in 2008, a meltdown that we in Europe transformed by our own actions into a lasting European crisis. The blame for that belongs to institutions and policies that proved wholly inadequate, particularly in the eurozone, consisting of nineteen countries. We have a single currency with nineteen different public debts, nineteen interest rates upon which the financial markets are completely free to speculate, nineteen corporate tax rates in unbridled competition with one another, without a common social safety net or shared educational standards—this cannot possibly work, and never will.…

New York Review of Books
A New Deal for Europe
Thomas Piketty
Translated from the French by Anthony Shugaar

See also

‘The EU Is on the Verge of Collapse’—An Interview
George Soros and Gregor Peter Schmitz

Piketty and Soros are both wishful thinkers, although Soros has considerable power to force things his way. But he is living in the past and now seems increasingly out of touch with reality.