Europe Doesn’t Need the Euro? Another religious tract to study on Sundays.
All of this is kind of like religion, don’t you think? First you’ve got some prophets who come out of the wilderness (the political class preaching the virtues of the euro, come hell or high water), then what they say gets labeled as heresy by the faithful (by the “man on the street” who wants to keep his deutschmark), then the euro faith overcomes this persecution, establishes itself as the true universal teaching and becomes orthodoxy. Then the next voice out of the wilderness comes along and the game starts all over again, etcetera and so forth already.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t beleive that Thilo Sarrazin is a full-fledged prophet or anything (I just think he wants to make a buck, I mean euro). But he’s not a full-fledged heretic, either. And that’s something the euro high priests could never admit to.
The euro, in Sarrazin’s view, is just the old German deutschmark extended to a lot of countries with less robust currencies.
Germany, in other words, is being used as a guarantor of other countries’ debts.
“The German political class bet that the political union would follow shortly thereafter almost as a matter of natural law, because without that the common currency wouldn’t be stable. That bet has failed.”
Germans are hostage to their sense of not wanting to be responsible for Europe’s failure.
Germans are hostage to their sense of historical guilt.
“Pro-euro Germans are driven by that very German reflex, that we can only finally atone for the Holocaust and World War II when we have put all our interests and money into European hands.”
“Angela Merkel to like the friendly woman on the navigation system in my car.”
