[FLT-bird]

You were right up until the end when you said the civil war was mostly about slavery. No it wasn't. It was about the very thing you spent the rest of your post describing.....the centralization of money/power in Washington DC and the use of that power to direct the money toward states that had more representation in Congress (ie the North especially the Northeast) and away from less populous states that had more money (ie the Southern States). Slavery was something the North was quite happy to compromise over. That's why they offered the Corwin Amendment. Of course slavery was something only less than 6% of the White Southern population participated in so its preservation by ironclad constitutional amendment was not appealing to them. What they were after was....money. They wanted to control their own commercial destiny (ie adopt low tariffs) and stop being treated as a cash cow by the Northern states. THAT's what the two sides actually fought over.

[Worldtraveler once upon a time]

--- "You were right up until the end when you said the civil war was mostly about slavery. No it wasn't."

Yup. April 1861 to January 1863, and it emancipation proclamation, was most definitely NOT about slavery. As with wars in general, it was about power and money.

Really quite the parallel to this thread's title, about "Central Planners - Europe attempts to address the failure of central planning with more central planning."

"More Europe" has been the mantra of the growing "power" -- by this I mean ineptitude -- of the EU and especially its European Commission which appoints its own small cadre of "soviets," given the use of a word which means "council." While the word has come to mean someone from the USSR, the word's meaning is clear. Ruling groups, in a structure quite like the old Soviets, just this generation's European "soviets."

Europe -- a civilization of many cultures and languages -- will still be Europe long after the European UNION goes through its "civil war," which will look so different than our of centuries ago. But the EU, with one of its founding fathers an Italian Communist, cannot long succeed on the current path of its cosseted and insular "commission."