Posted on 09/09/2012 12:25:22 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
....It is this desire for solitude...prompting Stephan Richter, director of The Globalist, a site that analyses global trends in the era of globalisation, to put forward the hypothesis that if the sixteenth-century German theologian Martin Luther could have been present at Maastricht in 1992 when the foundations of the monetary union were laid, he would have nixed the candidacy of the Mediterranean countries. Richter goes on to imagine that Luther would have declared that no unreformed Catholic countries that had not gone through the Protestant Reformation could enter the euro.
Richter is a Catholic commentator, and most importantly, he is German. According to his theory, an excess of Catholicism has distorted the fiscal health of nations, even today in the twenty-first century." The current bitterness of northern Europe towards the "other Europe" thus lies in the failure to uphold the "law of Luther," the violation of which has brought about our ills. If, in contrast, his imaginary exhortations had been heard correctly, "the euro would be more cohesive, and the European economy in far less trouble."
In brief: to size up the capability of a nation to join the single currency, it is not its finances that have to be vetted, but its religious chromosomes that would have been easier. The premise is very simple: the so-called Pigs, an acronym formed from the first letters of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, which with the double i in Piigs also takes in Italy, are apart from Greece, which is Greek Orthodox all countries with a Roman Catholic majority....
....Currently the controversy is driving some economists, mainly Spaniards, to trace the origins of capitalism in order to refute its Protestant backgrounds and advance, in contrast, the dynamism of capitalism in Catholic Spain precisely at the time of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
Got it. Forever and a day.
And I stick to what my granddad told me.
The EU. They forced themselves into an uncomfortable bed.
Now, at least, but becoming forthright, they will blame the muzzies.
They ain’t gonna take much more.
Like us. The United States. Given the choice to obey.
Or be free.
Not much of a choice.
The old protestant work ethic thing, pulled out of the dumpster, brushed off and repainted. Never gets old.
I’m not quite as versed in history as the author so I’ll have to give my condensed version.
It appears the ants are being asked to save the grasshoppers and the ants aren’t happy about it.
Austria is predominantly Catholic, as is Poland. These countries are plenty industrious. Greece is not predominantly Catholic. Iceland is not Catholic, but her debt problem was quite serious (admittedly, they are taking serious steps).
I think these prognosticators ought to take more factors into consideration before assigning a spread.
Blew it and failed right there. The German word for debt is "Schulden" not "Schuld" other than in some compound nouns. No native speaker would equate the two terms in the sense the author implies.
"It appears the ants are being asked to save the grasshoppers and the ants arent happy about it."
Those poor little ants worked awfully hard to make those evil grasshoppers part of their kingdom in order to ensure that they wouldn't become the low cost producers on the Continent and threaten the socialist paradises in Northern Europe. They lived quite well on the low cost labor in Southern Europe for decades while passing out ever more "free" goodies to their fellow ants.
Once they taught the grasshoppers to be just like them they brought in immigrants to replace those Southern Europeans they had depended on. And now someone thinks it's all the fault of the grasshoppers rather than the socialist garbage that's ruled Northern Europe for seventy-five years?
Most Northern Europeans are anything but the industrious little ants they might once have been, that's for sure.
Oh, and never mind that whiny opening sentence, where this Italian author is channeling Jesse Jackson if you replace “Catholic” with “black”. Face it Massimo, YOUR country sucks. Now do something to fix it instead of blaming others for YOUR faults! Your religion/race card has no value.
I would ask what you think accounts for the financial problems Greece is having now? War? Over taxation? Lack of taxation? Too much sun? What?
Easy credit and membership in the EU coupled with the chronic Greed disease of equating past glory with entitlement.
Then it’s little wonder tha countries like Germany might not want to loan more money.
I don't think the German people ever wanted to lend money in the first place.Their leaders were dedicated to keeping the status quo in place once the EU was established and knew what that entailed even though they didn't make that clear to the public. Once Greece and a few other countries figured out just which part of the German anatomy they had their hands on they saw no reason to not to take every penny the EU moron farm would let them have for whatever lame brained reason they could come up with.
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Maybe Germany can run the country for a while like emergency managers for cities in the U.S.
Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs Italian, the mechanics German, the lovers French and it is all organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where the police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss and it is all organized by Italians.
Germany running the entire EU for a while wouldn't be such a bad idea other than the fact that the Germans running the EU is exactly what most of the other members fear.
Spain was outside the Marshal plan when it came to redevelopment and spent years in isolation, then got a big influence of EC money -- to their credit they didn't get as tax-fraud like as the Greeks did, but then the Greeks had a communist problem until the 70s and then got a lot of free money.
Free money with no strings is the root cause of Greece and Spain's problem.
Italy's problems are more complex -- the north is productive, the south is not.
Ireland's problem was that it took on bank debt, not letting them fail like the Icelanders did (well the Irish couldn't do that, the British and others wouldn't let them)
Portugal's problem is different -- they haven't industrialized to any great sense.
good catch. Who is this author then?
well, the Greeks have done that in the past (read Tom Holland's Perso-Greek wars. The Persians couldn't understand them. But as a side-note the Greeks did conquer the greatest empire (40% of the world's population) just 200 years later.... and captive Greece captured the Roman empire)
NOTE: in many countries EU money was used wisely -- in Spain the infrastructure is superb, helping it dig itself out when it does. The Spain industry is not bad, but people are still shaking themselves off socialism.
But free money leads itself to a bad disease of getting used to it and thinking one is entitled to it.
That's not only the problem in these countries but also to welfare dependents in NZ, Aus, the UK, US etc.
The Germans running Greece, cyc? That's crazy talk. While i agree with you that it would be good, can you imagine the shouts of Nazis etc.? The Germans are p*sd off that when they wanted to help the Greeks they got accusations of not having paid back stolen Greek gold
The problem is that Greece should never have been added to the Eurozone (it was fine in the EU), ditto for Portugal. Ireland and Spain qualified easily and Italy with difficulty. Italy HAD to be in the eurozone as the third largest economy in mainland europe.
The Greeks quite frankly lied, with the help of GOldman Sachs if I'm not mistaken.
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