Say Cincinnatus, aren’t you one of those free market extremists?
Yes.
So why are you cheering (admittedly half-heartedly) about the defeat of France’s conservative president and the election, in his place, of an avowed socialist, who calls himself, “an enemy of finance”?
Good question. The answer is that I think the biggest pressing problem facing Europe today is the Euro. And the socialist central planners who set up the EU and the eurozone were so diabolically clever in setting it up that they got free market conservatives to champion central planning. They did this by joining free trade policy (which conservatives like) at the hip with central planning (which they want). As a result, France’s conservative president, Nicholas Sarkozy propped up the dying corpse of central planning throughout his reign with stop-gap measures like austerity and government bailouts.
This is why I am half-heartedly glad that he is gone. With Hollande, these programs will be that much less likely to be carried out. This has a number of good consequences that I am not sure Hollande does not intend. Without constant bailouts and austerity imposed by countries like Germany on countries like Greece, the EU will destabilize to the point where the PIIGS will depart the eurozone. When this is seen to not cause the end of the world, the entire EU edifice in Brussels will crumble.
But won’t Hollande’s prosperity-through-socialism prove to be economically disastrous for France? Oh, undoubtedly. But there is problem number 1 and problem number 2. In Europe today, problem number 1 is the price distortions caused by the centrally determined cost of money (i.e. the Euro) and Problem number 2 is everything else, whether the welfare state or unassimilatable Muslim immigrants. Problem number 1 needs to be dealt with today. Problem number 2 can wait until next week.
For instance, all of Greece’s current troubles are caused by the fact that it has to labour under a currency that is way too high for them. If it weren’t for the Euro, the Drachma would fall, the easy foreign credit would dry up (forcing Greeks to save), and Greek exports would become competitive again (putting Greeks back to work). As long as the Euro is in Greece, these things won’t happen and Greece will continue to bleed (and to get more indebted with each subsequent bailout package).
But wouldn’t a free-market-based disengagement from the European Union be better for France than more socialism, with its many negative side effects? Absolutely. But tell me, which candidate in the French Presidential elections is a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan? Such a politician currently does not exist in the French political landscape, so we have to settle for the lesser of two evils.
Machiavelli taught that if a political disease is too far-gone, the best solution is to let it run its course. The problem with Sarkozy is not that, in objective terms, he is a worse man than Hollande. He is not. He is a much better man. It’s just that he is good enough to keep the EU plodding along but not accomplished enough to tackle its contradictions head on. Machiavelli also taught that half-measures dig the grave deeper. By any measure, the Sarkozy legacy has been a series of half-measures.
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