Euro Debt Crisis - 2 views

Europe 2020: Things are pretty bad these days for the economies of Europe. But the crisis paves the way for an incredibly strong future.

Excerpt:

[While] Europe's crisis could very likely worsen. But if there is a positive scenario, it's this: by 2020, Europe's governments will—out of simple necessity—have become more efficient and less intrusive, the EU will have turned itself into a borderless and dynamic single market, and the continent's least competitive economies will have been forced to reform and innovate. If, that is, Europe's leaders don't let this crisis go to waste.

Comment: From Newsweek ... the "through rose-colored glasses", "Pollyannish" view

AND then there is the George Will view!

European Union: A coalition of irresponsibility

Excerpts:

Greece represents a perverse aspiration -- a society with (in the words of Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan) "more takers than makers," more people taking benefits from government than there are people making goods and services that produce the social surplus that funds government. By socializing the consequences of Greece's misgovernment, Europe has become the world's leading producer of a toxic product -- moral hazard. The dishonesty and indiscipline of a nation with 2.6 percent of the eurozone's economic product have moved nations with the other 97.4 percent -- and the United States and the International Monetary Fund -- to say, essentially: The consequences of such vices cannot be quarantined, so we are all hostages to one another and hence no nation will be allowed to sink beneath the weight of its recklessness.

Recklessness will proliferate.

"The coining of money," said William Blackstone more than two centuries ago, "is in all states the act of the sovereign power."

But the European Union is neither a state nor sovereign enough to enforce its rules: No euro-zone nation is complying with the E.U. requirement that deficits not exceed 3 percent of gross domestic product.

...

If money represents, as Emerson said, the prose of life, the euro reflects a determination to make European life prosaic. It is an attempt to erase nationalities and subsume politics in economics in order to escape from European history. The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

It also presupposes something else nonexistent. The word "democracy" incorporates the Greek demos -- people. As the recent rampages of Greece's demos, and the reciprocated disdain of Germany's demos, demonstrate, Europe remains a continent of distinct and unaffectionate peoples. There is no "European people" united by common mores.

Comment: The US is next .... "The U in the E.U. -- the unifying thread -- is indiscipline. Increasingly, it also is the unifying characteristic of the USA. "