Why, just this morning an article was posted, noting that 10 years after Portual had decriminalized drug use, there was no negative effect....
Anybody suppose there’s an undocumented reduction in motivation and productivity there?
The low-productivity, high-grift societies of the countries along the Med aren’t news, they’re hardly undocumented and they were well noted by the German, northern EU, French and UK Euro-skeptics - again, and again, and again.
Each time, they were called “racists” and so on.
For example: Greece has been in default, or something similar, on average about every two to three years for the 100 years prior to admission to the Euro. Italy has been an economic basket case on regular intervals since the fall of the Roman empire. Spain enjoyed a brief period of economic success whilst they were plundering and looting wealth from South America... right up until the point when the wrangled with those pasty, pale English.
Portugal: Their economic history of the last 100 years is so convoluted, so tortured, that I can only recommend that you go investigate it for yourself. In so doing, you’ll see that the issue of declining output, declining investment, etc is NOT a new development for them. You’ll see that private capital has been treated very shabbily in Portugal for decades. Go look up “the Carnation Revolution” WRT Portugal’s recent economic history. Look at their economic output and investment before and after this “Carnation Revolution.”
The brutal, unflinching truth of the matter is this:
The Euro can’t work with two completely different economic cultures within it.
You can’t have industrious, thrifty, productive northern Europe on the one side, and spendthrift, left-wing grifter governments and cultures on the other side of the compact. It ain’t gonna work. And no set of economic straightjacket conditions is ever going to turn a Greek, Italian, Spaniard, or Portagee Catholic into a thrifty northern European Protestant. Ain’t gonna happen. Not now, not 10 years from now, not ever.