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What's Wrong With The EU

Monday, 22nd October 2007

Roger Bootle has a nice piece this morning:

The world is full of large countries, in terms of both area and population, whose GDP per head, and growth rate, are low. By contrast, there are umpteen examples of small and even micro states which succeed economically. Why is this? The prime reason is that small states tend to enjoy good government. Because the countries are small and vulnerable the politicians are forced to recognise the limits to what they can do. With large states the elites can tilt at whatever windmills they like and the coffers will still overflow and they will still survive.

As has been noted ad nauseam there's a lot of ruin in a nation: and further that none of us wish to be like the Zimbabweans and find out quite how much. But Bootle's absolutely correct: Soviet levels of incompetency practised in a small place like Luxembourg would have the Grand Duke hanging from his heels in the main square in months, not last for 70 odd years as they did in Russia. The very size of the EU is thus a danger as a political unit.

All the signs are that the EU elite has not the slightest conception of how wealth is generated, as opposed to taxed and redistributed. Essentially the EU is living off capital – the history, the culture and the national institutions which history has bequeathed it. But it is laying down nothing new of value. The EU is likely to continue to be an economic failure for years to come.

There is, of course, an answer, which is to have the EU elite entirely divorced from the way anything is run. Hang them all might work, as might simply reverting to what we actually joined, a Common Market.