Christian Science Monitor
December 7, 2010
This week, like the last one, was dominated by euro babel. Speaking in their various tongues, all at once, Europeans were talking nonsense. Especially Jose-Ignacio Torreblanca. The senior fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations begins: “in an ideal world,” he says it is “fair and rational” for people to get what they’ve got coming… referring to the people who lent money to Irish banks. He even quotes the old Latin maxim: fiat iustitia, pereat mundus (follow the rules, even if the world should perish).
He should have stopped there. Instead, he misses the point he has just made. This time it’s different, he says. Why? Because “there is a good chance that in real life the eurozone could be killed…”
When the financial crisis hit in ’08, Europe might have let the chips fall where they may. But for nearly a century, elected officials have thought they could keep the chips from falling at all. Instead of merely consuming and redistributing the fruits of the economy; they pretended, by enlightened management, to increase them. Few people noticed the audacity of it. But in a downturn, government no longer lets wealth perish. It counteracts corrections with “stimulus.” And it doesn’t merely provide a stable currency, it manages a “flexible” currency system to help guarantee full employment and prevent debt crises.
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