{"id":530,"date":"2014-10-24T01:08:40","date_gmt":"2014-10-24T01:08:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=530"},"modified":"2014-10-24T01:08:40","modified_gmt":"2014-10-24T01:08:40","slug":"the-death-rattle-of-europes-statist-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=530","title":{"rendered":"The Death Rattle of Europe\u2019s Statist Dream |"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Death Rattle of Europe\u2019s Statist Dream |<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Europe\u2019s all-too-predictable relapse into recession is gathering force, threatening not only the pipe dream of economic and political unity, but eroding grandiose illusions that have helped prop up the world\u2019s financial house of cards. The unwillingness of France in particular to play by the EU\u2019s \u2014 i.e., \u00a0Germany\u2019s \u2014 rules appears to have doomed the EU dream.<\/p>\n

The idea of a border-less Europe bound by a common currency and a shared desire to forever banish war from the Continent was a lofty one, but it was mired from the start in deeply rooted political animosities, grass-roots skepticism and bureaucratic overreach. Now these problems, along with a great many others, have turned the EU project into a Tower of Babel. A million pages of meticulously codified EU rules might as well have been written in cuneiform, so inscrutable and arcane have they become.<\/p>\n

And useless as well. France\u2019s prolonged economic death rattle has been made possible by running annual deficits larger by half than the 3% \u201callowed\u201d by Brussels. And now, channeling \u00a0de Gaulle for what could turn out to be France\u2019s last hurrah, the French have flouted Merckel\u2019s authority, and common sense itself, by proposing to remedy the problem by hiring more government workers and expanding tax breaks.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Death Rattle of Europe\u2019s Statist Dream |. Europe\u2019s all-too-predictable relapse into recession is gathering force, threatening not only the pipe dream of economic and political unity, but eroding grandiose illusions that have helped prop up the world\u2019s financial house of cards. The unwillingness of France in particular to play by the EU\u2019s \u2014 i.e., […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[195,279,280,281,282,284],"class_list":["post-530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-debt","tag-eu","tag-euro","tag-europe","tag-european-central-bank","tag-european-union"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}