Wow, now there's a shocker!
They have over 33% unemployment??!! They might as well give up now.
This little Freudian slip shows just how deep the socialist conditioning really is. These people are writing a report criticizing bureaucracy and STILL think that governments are capable of creating prosperity. It's government heal thyself.
It won't happen. If they want the cure for state bureaucracy, it's for sale, cheap.
I just finished a trip to Austria (an EU member) and a side trip to Prague ( a soon to be member, not yet on the Euro). In talking with the locals in both countries, I was more than a little interested in the EUs effects on the people of both countries. Here are some of my observations and conclusions:
The Euro is facillitating travel within the member countries in ways that were probably foreseen, and this is no small thing. Italians were EVERYWHERE.
The street value of the dollar was at least ten percent more than its value in the licensed venues. This I had never encountered in my previous trips to Vienna. EU monkey business? I think so. Most of my Austrian friends had gotten over the initial run up of prices, which have now settled down somewhat.
Prague of course, is fairly new to capitalism, and there are upsides and downsides to this. The cabbie at the train station charged us three times the going rate to take us to the hotel. We didn't know until we took a cab back to the same train station. The Euro seemed to me to be more welcome than the dollar. Unprecedented.
In Germany and Austria we encountered a lot of anti-American graffitti on the walls, in the bathrooms (Bush is Hitler) but absolutely no animosity from the people. Very nice to us, and it didn't change once we were identified as American. In Prague, however, I felt an even greater comfort level. They actually LIKE us, I only got to talk to a few waiters in restaurants, one of whom told me he hoped we would kick Saddams ass!
Anyway, hope these observations are interesting to freepers.
It's a little difficult not to do so when what you're trying to do is to conflate 15 economies of differing performance into one. Germany found this out when it absorbed its Eastern half into a common economy with a common currency. Citizens used to a certain level of surplus utilization on their behalf - social programs - must "sacrifice" these in favor of capital investment in the areas of lower productivity, and hope that the return in time will result in a recovery of the social spending to which they've become accustomed. This was not an entirely happy process, nor is it complete.
Multiply that by 15 and you have a big project. The U.S. has, in fact, 50 separate state economies coexisting with an overall national one, within which differences between the state economies are subject to adjustment by federal subsidy (which is what Brussels is trying) but also by movement of both population and business from one location to another. There are also differing levels of social spending from one state to another. If this is the model the EU will follow then Brussels is going to have to allow for some local autonomy; if not, then the EU is likely to experience either the disadvantages of a command economy or dislocations of both industry and population. But there is, I think, more resistance to Spanish workers taking jobs in Copenhagen than there is to Oklahomans migrating to Silicon Valley. And there is also a larger disparity in both productivity and social services between Southern and Northern Europe than there is, say, between South and North U.S.
It's the old choice in economics - try to force it or just let things shake out on their own. My sense is that Brussels will be compelled to try and force it, both through personal inclinations of professional bureaucrats and through overly high expectations of the advantages of a common economy. I wish them luck.
Short people got
No reason to live...
...and water is wet.