The misbegotten European Union

This is based on a comment I made here.


Commenter Tomasz Wegrzanowski made the comment that:

ECB [European Central Bank] is officially supposed to care only about inflation. It’s a retarded design of a central bank, so [ECB President] Trichet doing retarded things and bragging about them is by design.

As is normal when it comes to EU dysfunction, the problem is not a bug but a feature. Being the most inflation-pure Central Bank was the “winning” strategy on which to make the euro credible, so that was taken.

One has to understand that the EU is misbegotten at its core. Its core idea is that nationalism was the great sin of European history, that nationalism is a popular sentiment, so inappropriate popular sentiments are the great danger. The so-called “democratic deficit” is the original EU-not-a-bug-but-a-feature. All based on the idea that the EU elite can steer the benighted masses into a new world of harmony. Plato’s Republic Bureaucratised. (Or is that Eurocratised? Possibly Brusselscratised?)

Actually, the great problem of European history was irresponsible power, and creating a new regime of irresponsible power is a “cure” which is just more of the disease.

A badly designed European Central Bank focused on what the elite thinks is a mark of “true” credibility is just par for the course.