Gee, it’s an easy call for the Tundra Tabloids to make, RETREAT!
The TT calls for the retreat of all statist projects all over Europe and elsewhere in the West. The Eurocrats lied from the very beginning about their intentions to form a federalized state, that would supersede the sovereignty of its member states. It’s exactly what the Founding Fathers of the nascent US were worried about, and warned against, while crafting their ingenious document of the constitution.
What is going on in Europe is exactly what the statists in the US have been trying to do with their founding document, to erode state rights and sovereignty. Retreat dammit, all of you Eurocrats, retreat, for the sake of liberty and individual freedoms, retreat, and all of you Europeans who read this blog, make your voices known, demand that they retreat! KGS
H/T: Fjordman
Federalism or retreat? Eurozone is divided over its future
The eurozone, having failed to contain a raging debt crisis for the past year, now faces stark choices for its future: a radical leap towards federalism or a step backwards in the European project. Quarrels over crafting a new bailout for Greece — technical disputes over debt restructuring or private sector involvement — hide deep political divisions between nations over where to take Europe and the euro. “The leaders of Europe are refusing to address the only real challenge: how do we move towards real federalism, that has become obligatory since the introduction of our federal currency, the euro, which is now demanded by the financial markets,” said Jean-Dominique Giuliani, president of the Robert Schuman Foundation think tank.
Under the leadership of the then French president Francois Mitterrand and German chancellor Helmut Kohl, Europeans made a risky bet in the 1990s by paving the way for the creation of the euro. The single currency area was born in 1999, but without a common budgetary policy, other than debt and deficit rules, to prevent wayward spending as each state jealously guarded its fiscal sovereignty. A decade later, the global financial crisis plunged Europe into the worst recession since World War II and public deficits began to mushroom. The bloc’s Stability and Growth Pact, designed to ensure governments keep deficits under 3.0 percent of national output, demonstrated it lacked the teeth to dissuade the type of over-spending that led to Greece’s budget blowout.
The European Union and IMF were forced to rescue three eurozone nations: first Greece with a 110-billion-euro ($157-billion) bailout in May 2010, then Ireland in November with 85 billion euros and finally Portugal in June with 78 billion euros. In addition, the eurozone created a 440-billion-euro financial stability fund in an effort to reassure markets that the single currency area will not let any of its members collapse into bankruptcy. EU states also agreed to have their national budgets reviewed by the European Commission before they are adopted by national parliaments. Nearly every time, Europe’s leaders were criticised for moving too slowly, one step behind the markets.
