27 May 2012
By Ed Morrissey
In his latest Afterburner series, Bill Whittle
offers a couple of themes warning about the severe turbulence in the
Eurozone and the increasingly likely crash of its common currency.
Bill, a pilot himself, discusses the crash of an Airbus into the south
Atlantic a few years ago as a parable for excessive shielding of
critical signals, and the resulting disunity and counterproductive
approaches that follow from it:
Frankly, the information on the Air France crash is rather
unnerving. I hadn’t heard those details before now, but it sounds like a
great reason to stick with Boeing when possible. It works well as an
analogy in this case, though, and perhaps in a few others. For
instance, the problem in rapidly-rising health-care costs is a
combination of technological advances that are difficult to comprehend, a
legal atmosphere that forces providers to practice defensive medicine
unnecessarily, and the shielding of price signals from consumers by the
presence of third-party payers. Because we don’t see the problems
clearly, we respond in irrational ways — and because we tend to fear
what we don’t comprehend, we’re reacting by making the third-party payer
and signal-shielding issues worse instead of better.
Europe has a reason for the disunity, which goes to the core of their
experiment: multiple sovereign nations managing a single currency.
Germans end up having to suffer the consequences of irresponsibility in
Greece, Spain, and France without having any real political power to
prevent or punish it, short of pulling out of the euro. That has always
been the rot at the center of the euro, and it was just a matter of
time until it became a critical problem. The only way the euro would
work in the long run would have been a federalization of Europe into one
sovereign entity, an outcome that its peoples clearly do not want and
which European language and cultural barriers wouldn’t allow even if
popular sentiment supported unification initially. The UK looks like
the most brilliant nation in Europe for its longstanding and prescient
Euro skepticism.
The US doesn’t have that problem with the dollar; we just have the
same sense of unreality and problems reading the signals. We can act to
prevent the dollar’s stall that will surely come when the entitlement
collapse arrives. The only question is whether we will.
No comments:
Post a Comment