Ever get the sense that the Euro is kind of like the bad boy that nice girl thinks she can change? Only later does she realize what a fool she has been. People don’t change.
The Finnish are still contemplating an exit. Nobody wants to be the first rat off the ship for fear that the drunk captains will blame the sinking on the rats. Something about the rats causing the hull to lose confidence or something.
But back to the whole “people don’t change” thing. That is what the whole Euro and EU mess is all about. Like a battered girlfriend, Europeans think that if they can just get the bad boy to love her a little more then everything will be fine. It won’t.
I found this paragraph in the Wall Street Journal to be indicative of the syndrome.
Mr. Sorman, who is 68, offers his generation’s longer perspective to calm nerves. “Governments act like a fireman trying to extinguish the fire of the day,” he says. They should instead give the media and bond traders a better sense of where the EU plans to go.
But first he wants to recall where it’s come from. “In the U.S. generally there is a kind of misunderstanding about the purpose of Europe,” he says. “Europe was not built for economic reasons, but to bring peace between European countries. It is a political ambition. It is the only political project for our generation. We’ll pay the price to save this project.“
Well there it is. If only, if only we can get closer together. If we just move in together, it will all be different and all the pain and hurt will go away.
I have said it before and I will say it again. A bunch of post-Christian European eggheads decided that after centuries of acting like the Hatfields and the McCoys, or the bad boyfriend and his bruised girlfriend, the path to a permanent peace was for all of them to open a joint bank account with unlimited overdraft. How they ever thought that was a good idea, I will never know.
Its over. The quicker they realize it, the better off they will all be. Right now they seem to be taking the news of the inevitable like Glenn Close feeling needy. I think we can expect some boiled rabbits before this is all over.
