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Posted on 05/11/2013 7:13:12 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
Even as President Obama is following in Eurosocialist footsteps, the 14-year utopian experiment on a single currency is collapsing. The architect of the euro just ran up the white flag on the biggest policy mistakes in history. Former German Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine called his own brainchild a "catastrophe".
"The economic situation is worsening from month to month," he wrote on his Left party blog. "unemployment has reached a level that puts democratic structures ever more in doubt."
"Catastrophe" is the right word.
Today Greece is suffering more than 50% unemployment. That's worse than the Great Depression in the US. This winter in Athens, people cut down the trees in the city parks for firewood. They couldn't afford to buy heating fuel. The resulting wood smoke created the worst smog in decades, obscuring even the Parthenon. About half of the younger people are leaving the country.
Ireland, Spain, and even France are in distress. The Netherlands economy is the worst in half a century. Only Germany is still going strong, and that fact is creating deep resentment. Germany can afford the euro. Other countries can't. The industrious Germans make the euro expensive, while being shackled to the same currency makes Greek and Italian exports harder to sell. A single, one-size-fits-all currency can't adjust to market conditions in widely varying spocieties and economies
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Milton Friedman has done more damage to the United States and its citizens than any other economist.Still chuckling over that one.
I always knew it would collapse: It’s fiat nothingness.
Ping.
Absurd, the author is wrong. Youth unemployment is higher than that, but not overall.
50% tends to bring about revolutions, riots, revenge, take your pick.
Tower of Babel redux.
I don't know if Greece cooks the books like the USA does, but 27.2% is really bad but is not 50%.
These people want one world money so they can tax even the machete loggers of Zimbabwe.
I believe the 50% is only the youth rate.
What he neglected to add to his appraisal: "Isn't this wonderful?"
If they do “calculate” their rate like we do and admit 27.2%, it probably is really 50%
I'll agree with it; he did come op with the idea of income-tax withholdings.
It's not the currency; money is just a medium of exchange. It's the foolish behavior of Greece, et al. which has caused the crisis. They all overspent and overborrowed.
There is no magical reason why the Euro works just fine in northern Europe but not in the South. The author is suggesting that the only way out of the crisis is for those countries to rob their citizens through inflation.
Of course, that's quite stylish these days.
In wartime, when a government and people are fighting for their survival, many measures are appropriate that are not justified in time of peace. As the US Constitution plainly agrees.
To put it in its bluntest form, which is worse, income tax withholding or invasion and conquest?
The US never actually faced that stark a choice, but then nobody really knew that at the time.
Au contraire. The Greeks and others were given massive incentives for their overspending and overborrowing. As most people know, when incentives are given most people will respond to them.
The answer is not to expect people tp be nobly self-denying and ignore the incentives, it is to avoid providing the incentives in the first place.
Multiple currencies act as a kind of free-market check and balance. Nobody would have lent the Greeks all this money if they were going to be paid back in drachma, subject to devaluation if too much was printed. Being paid back in euros backed by Germany, no problem!
:: Friedman’s globalist economics totally focus on consumption and ignore the problem of production. ::
Let’s turn that around a bit...
Liberal economics totally neglect that citizens participate in production (e.g., “work) to indulge in consumption.
Uncle Miltie was right. So was Hayek’s treatise on the validity of a government run economy (AKA, The Return to Serfdom).
It would be nice to have a way to seek out and sort FR articles from around a decade ago. Several of us had long discussions about subjects such as the foolishness of the euro, islamofascist terrorism, immigration, and other subjects that would be great to bring back. I know many here were expounding on the foolishness of the euro and the reasons it would fail. There are many who can say “I told you so...” who would love to have the evidence to point to, as well as to refresh our minds on the reasoning we relied on.
What's truly amazing is that many on the forum defended that statement. They've probably spent a lot of time watching Phil Donohue.
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