Saturday, June 09, 2012
"Europe finally awakes from its utopian dream"
Unless you've been in a coma for the past few years, you know the European concept (socialism) is failing, and failing badly.
Even so, some elected leaders continue to embrace it, and those that do NOT are belittled in the liberal world for taking that stand...
Even so, some elected leaders continue to embrace it, and those that do NOT are belittled in the liberal world for taking that stand...
In the U.K. Daily Telegraph, Janet Daley includes these paragraphs in her article on that subject:
"This is not just a story of bureaucratic grandiosity, or of German insistence on domination. Certainly it is true that there is an irreconcilable cultural clash between the more puritanical North and the, shall we say, more indulgent South. It turns out that Marx was wrong about economic conditions determining political behaviour: a nation’s religion and geography are much more likely to affect its economic attitudes than the other way round. But it is not the dream of European co-operation that was doomed from the start: given the ancient hatreds and unforgivable sins of the past, that was difficult, but it was not impossible. What has made the project unworkable is the insistence that the EU be a vehicle for democratic socialism: the impossible dream was not European unity but universal 'social solidarity' stretching across a continent, for which the single market was simply a milch cow to produce the funds. Unfeasibly enormous social security and entitlement promises were made on the basis that the free market would always provide. Nobody bothered to ask what would happen when the market faltered or fluctuated (as genuinely free markets do) or when the sense of entitlement outgrew the wealth that could be created. The problem is not unique to Europe."
