> there would no end of "EU is trampling national interests" and similar screaming
To just call this "screaming" is to completely dismiss a real and huge problem. The EU is the idea that countries should fuse into economic areas, but the countries are also individual still. Of course there's a lot of friction.
For example, because Greece was in the Euro, they couldn't inflate their currency to compensate for the fact that they gradually outsourced more and more work to Germany, until they had nothing left and hit a financial crisis because their government couldn't borrow more money. That's not mindless screaming.
Do you realize that your example actually counters your point? The Greece's example illustrates that a misbehaving minority shouldn't have an outsized influence on the majority, which is a correct thing to aim for, I completely agree with you on that. But the current EU arrangement actually allows minority entities to veto majority's initiatives and improvements, exactly because EU is not fully federated. 1 member country can screech and blackmail 26 other members for any arbitrary reason, and they all must comply with this minority's ultimatum. If EU was a federation, majority would simply outvote any obstructionists.
This is too simplistic. Most eu laws pass by simple or qualified majority.
So you've described Greece as a bunch of scheming petulant children.
"Our plan to be inaccountable didn't work, so we'll try a different scheme instead".
And yes, it's a huge problem. That's why I called the situation unwinnable.
They could neither fix the problem with the policy tools a country with its own currency would have, nor did they have the automatic support from a central budget a region or state of a country would have.
Greece could have fixed their problems by cutting spending and collecting more taxes (not necessarily higher taxes, but actually collecting the taxes that were owed). Currency inflation was never necessary.
I think they did? At the cost of very slow recovery, which I think is the problem with austerity measures.
Austerity is not a "problem", it's simply the only remaining option when you run out of other people's money.
Countries can inflate their debt away at the cost of eroding savings and new borrowing becoming more expensive, no?
https://www.statbureau.org/en/greece/inflation-charts-yearly
Countries can't push that approach very far before new borrowing doesn't just become more expensive, it becomes effectively impossible.
> So you've described Greece as a bunch of scheming petulant children.
Can you quote where I did that, please?
No, the Greeks were cool and calculating, turning an inflating fake fiat currency into hard assets like real estate, while not working or producing anything.
The introduction of the Euro was the start signal for each country to try to inflate as much as they can for their own benefit - since the first inflator gets the best value out of the currency. Idiots are left holding paper currency worth less and less each day. Having to work harder and harder in a never ending spiral.
The Euro had a much better set of inflation controls than most of the previous European currencies. Especially the lire.
Absolutely. But when you inflate your own currency, it is you who have to deal with the consequences. If you inflate everyone's currency you reap all the benefits and leave everybody else with the burden of the consequences.
But part of the setup was that inflation was controlled centrally by the ECB? How are you declaring that national governments inflated it?