Posted on 09/13/2009 5:26:57 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Mario Monti, the European Union's former Competition tsar, says abandonment of free market principles is deadly.
The global financial crisis has inflicted such damage to free market principles that it risks undermining the core function of Brussels and triggering the disintegration of the European Union, according to the EU's most revered economic figure.
"The EU faces a quasi-existential crisis," said Mario Monti, who ran the EU's market and competition directorates for a decade.
"The special role played by the Commission in EU integration is based on the market, and this crisis has brought the market economy itself into crisis. It has lost respectability. This threatens to tip the Community into disintegration," he told The Daily Telegraph.
"We have seen an extremely bad example from the world champions, the US, and the UK, which generated this crisis by years of mistakes and lack of rule enforcement.
"The speed with which they ditched free-market principles in a matter of weeks was remarkable. The UK spoke of 'British workers for British jobs'. The policy reflexes have become national again," he said.
Mr Monti is known as "Super Mario" for his role as Competition tsar in battling Germany's Landesbanken and blocking the merger of GE and Honeywell in 2001.
There were already signs of market "fatigue" before the crisis, especially in France where Left decries EU rules as an Anglo-Saxon assault on Gallic values. Both the Takeover and Services directives were emasculated.
The pace has quickened over the last year as banks are pressured to cut exposure abroad and target lending at home. France said rescue aid for car industry should not be diverted to plants in Eastern Europe.
In effect, there has been a broad assault on the "Four Freedoms" enshrined in EU treaty law: the free movement of goods, capital, services, persons
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
The EU should be abolished. It will anyway when Islam takes over.
We could start calling it the European Caliphate.
They might decide to rename Europe into something else
Free market? What free market. You can’t sell lemonade with out a lawyer.
The central banks played with fiat currency the way 5-year Communist planning czars did with paper reports. They made it up as the went along and pretend that they weren’t responsible.
....and now they blame the ‘free market’? W....T...F?
Well stated BUMP!
This was predicted to happen when the EUSSR adopted the EUro.
The Germans will not support the whole EUrotopian experiment. They learned their lesson when they absorbed East Germany and it's currency at a one to one exchange for the Deutschemark.
yitbos
That’s a good quote at the end of that article. Thanks for posting it. Did you see “Competition tsar” at the beginning? LOL!
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