But so too has the ability of the European Central Bank to create money from nothing been the drug with which they addicted the foolish Greeks. You float them, then wreck them.
It has long been my sense that something like this was the original intent both of the International Monetary Fund–which has been wrecking economies virtually since its inception with imbecilic Keynesian economics–and World Bank.
Centralization pours cold water on individual development. It fosters corruption, and enables a power elite to buy off the poor with other people’s money. That can of course only last so long.
To this day, the Greeks seem to think that governments can have money which they have not first taken in taxes, borrowed, or printed. But they can’t. They have those three methods only, with confiscation outright in a Communistic fashion merely being the logical end game of taxes. It is a total, rather than a partial, seizure of assets. The principle is the same; it is merely any sense of proportion which has been exhausted.
And returning to the main point, the EU is currently more or less a Confederation. Most policies are still set at the local–which is to say the national level–and not in Brussels. They do have a Central Bank (why again are people blind to groups in our midst empowered by law to create money, sometimes in unlimited amounts and with little or no accountability?), but not final authority on most issues.
With regard to Greece, it may soon be the case that their folly has destroyed their democracy and again redirected their national sovereignty northward–much farther north, this time, than Macedonia.