Euro-Crap

    Stephen Potter, the English humorist who coined the word "Gamesmanship" (the art of winning without actually cheating), referred to Economics as the "Plonking Science." Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century satirist and historian, called it the "Dismal Science." Others have described it as the science that denies the utterly obvious. To my way of thinking these various appellations are overpolite in honoring the shadowy discipline with the word "Science" ─ Plonking, Dismal or otherwise.
    In my non-humble opinion the idiot savants who populate the profession belong to the same phylum of useless life forms as Philosophers, Priests, Sociologists, Mystics, and Marketers ─ that is to say they are men and women who are unemployable in worthwhile jobs and thus gravitate to crap vocations where they spend their working hours spouting useless rubbish to each other, writing useless tomes for academic consumption, and misinstructing students and other gullible fools about how to run their lives, businesses, government offices, and bank accounts.
    This brings us to the euro and the slow-motion catastrophe that is currently unfolding in Europe and roiling the world’s stock markets.

● What in God’s name possessed a clique of s European bureaucrats to come up with the foolhardy idea of a single European currency?

● What possessed the member states of the European Community to buy into the madness?

● What kind of grass were they smoking when they imagined that 20 sovereign nations representing a bewildering mix of ethnic, sectarian, and racial groups, each with histories of warfare and conquest; subjugation and victory; bigotry, savagery, and hatred going back 5,000 years, could be welded into a unified superstate?

    Just how many failed regimes, national upheavals, forced migrations, impoverished economies, and mass starvations ─ how much universal misery ─ does it take to get through to these learnéd fools that governmentally regulated economic systems ─ and that is precisely what the euro represents ─ JUST DON’T WORK.
    Kim Jong-il’s North Korea, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, Hoxha’s Albania, Ulbricht’s East Germany, Mao Zedong’s China, Gomulka’s Poland, and dozens more "Planned Economies," "Worker’s Paradises," and "Democratic Republics" bear testimony to the folly of the controlled economy. Attempts to reshape human nature through edicts from on high and pistols to the head ─ no matter how doctrinaire the party, no matter how repressive the regime, no matter how brutal the leadership ─ are doomed to ignoble failure.
    Can not the intelligentsia, with its passion for social engineering and its ragtag duffel of quasi-religious aphorisms, ever grasp the simple fact that some things in the universe are beyond man’s control?
    Can not the theorists of the Sorbonne and Heidelberg understand that a grubby little man in a Soho loft is incapable of creating a roadmap to Nirvana rather than a blueprint for disaster?
    Can not these pale academic wraiths who would remake mankind in their own flaccid image accept the humble truth that the pathway to well-being is through evolution, not revolution, through the slow, natural working of things rather than by waving a magical, mystical bureaucratic wand ─ no matter how well-intentioned the wand-waver may claim to be?
    The highway to oblivion is paved with the detritus of grandiose schemes of economic planners ─ as though a self-appointed board of experts like the Maastricht cabal or a semi-paranoid tyrant like Fidel Castro could manage through diktat the unfathomably complex chaos of the marketplace with a copy of Das Kapital in one hand and four hundred pages of legalistic clap-trap in the other.
    The whole European Unity push (or putsch) was crammed down the throats of the continent’s lesser lights by France and Germany...France, with its obsession with the omnipotence of Cartesian Logic (the same obsession that led to its military collapse in World War II); Germany with its desperate yearning to rid itself of its Hitlerian Sisyphus-boulder of guilt.
    What hubris!
    Did these petty bureaucrats really think they could set a continent of sovereign nations encompassing 500 million humans on a path that would mold them into a United States of Europe by the imposition of a creaking universal-currency edifice made of sticks and straw?
    How could these Herr Doktors and holders of Diplômes d'Études Approfondies fail to understand that the "States" of the United States, which they imagined they could emulate, are not and never were independent nations with their own armed forces, own rulers, own languages, and own mores, but, rather, administrative units with a common language and common history within an all-encompassing Federal shell.
    The purpose of the framers of the U. S. Constitution was to prevent the Europeanization of America. As far as Europe is concerned, that ship sailed many millenia ago, long before even Sparta and Athens began duking it out in the Peloponnese.
    There would be no Greek Crisis, Spanish Crisis, Irish Crisis, Portuguese Crisis, Italian Crisis, (and lord knows how many future crises) if those nations had their own free-floating currencies.
    If the citizens of Greece want to live in a welfare state consisting of two or three productive workers for every seven or eight government slugs ─ fine. Without the shackles of the Euro, the Greek drachma could float downward to its proper level on the currency exchanges of the world and, should the population so desire, go the way of the Zimbabwe dollar which, when last heard from, was being issued in Z$100 trillion denominations.
    The virtue of this scenario is that the economic well-being of other nations (including Germany, France, and the U. S.) wouldn’t be hostage to the vagaries of Greek street mobs. As a side benefit, the citizens of Greece could once again enjoy the heart-warming luxury of blaming their self-imposed woes on non-existent conspiracies by non-existent Jewish speculators.
    One can’t but wonder if the notoriously hard-working and thrifty citizens of Germany, having already donated a few hundred billion dollars to their Greek non-brethren, are going to continue to cough up their hard-earned bank deposits to bail out other profligate neighbors to the south: Throw Spain, Italy, and Portugal into the pot, sprinkle in a dash of Ireland, season with a few hundred billion euros for contingency, and voilà! ─ the Royal Bank of Scotland estimates that a mere €3.5 trillion ($5 trillion U. S.) slush fund would prevent the collapse of the euro for at least a year, maybe two.
    Who the fuck do these people think they are? Barack Obama?
    Hey! Not to worry! Just start up the printing presses and pretty soon we’ll all be eating Chinese takeout.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

 

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