Slovenia is likely to need a bailout according to some thats six how many more?

So, while the euro is becoming publicly unpopular in Germany, it seems likely that the German government will treat that in much the same way the UK government treats the unpopularity of EU membership, and for the same reason.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw wrote: »

Mostly, yes, in my own odd way. If it simply wasn't there tomorrow I'd be fine with that either - it's what I grew up with, so it wouldn't bother me very much in itself.

But if it did disappear tonight it would be reinvented tomorrow anyway, because what makes the EU useful makes it, in effect, necessary, unless European countries have a yen to become a collection of second-rate backwaters - which they don't.

We live in a period of closure, where nearly every country is connected into the global net (even the African countries, although their presence only registers very faintly) through really quite rapid trade and communications links. A global meta-culture and marketplace are forming, plus we face a number of pressing and highly important planetary-scale issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and so on. Small countries like Ireland can't influence such a world at all, but we can influence the EU, and the EU can influence the world - so in terms of projecting what we, as citizens of Ireland, have to offer, or believe to be right, there is no option but a European Union. Were I in the UK, I would probably feel differently - the UK is one of the few European countries with global reach, although that reach is much exaggerated in the minds of many UK citizens. But for Ireland, there is no option to influence the world without the EU (or going back to the UK), and the world is a place where one is either a happener or a happenee - inwards-looking isolation doesn't produce anything but material, intellectual, and political poverty.



None of the bailouts come anywhere even close to the estimated costs of eurozone breakup, or even exit. Not even Greece, which is why it has blinked whenever it has been faced with potential exit.



Sure, but...? There's a good bit less inside the EU, and a hell of a lot less than there was when I was growing up.



One of the reasons we have governments is because the electorate is very fickle, and relatively easily persuaded to vote against their own best interests. That's not because they're stupid, but because they're concerned first and foremost with their own lives and with their prospects for the next year or so. As a result the majority of people quite rationally pay little attention to political and economic affairs until they're directly affected, and then only usually to the extent they're directly affected. In turn, that means they have no fixed views on major issues, and their opinion changes with each new piece of information, often on the basis of either shallow or misleading claims, as long as they're made loudly enough. And from my own experience, it is very much easier to get an inaccurate soundbite repeated everywhere and believed by nearly everyone than it is to get people to look at real facts.

As I regularly point out, for example, nearly everybody in Ireland believes that German banks were heavily invested as bondholders in our banks - but there is, quite simply, no hard evidence for it at all. Billions upon billions of euros in German bank money is supposed to have flooded Ireland with a tidal wave of credit - without leaving a paper trail of any kind.

If such a major claim can be believed without any evidence, what can't be believed?

Same thing with Irish fisheries - people quote figures from other people, and when you finish tracing the source you find nothing at all - a number someone said, without any particular justification, and that everyone else repeated for 20 years without challenging it!

So electorates are prone to making up their minds on the basis of no evidence, and that's rather obviously a problem. People often dismiss such problems by saying that the will of the people is all that's important*, but the will of the people only makes decisions, it doesn't provide truth. The electorate obviously can make a bad decision - an observation that tends to provoke horrified gasps of "heresy!", but is completely self-evident. Whatever side one was on in Lisbon, for example, it's clear that the electorate made a bad decision - if one was on the No side, the second decision was a bad decision, if one was on the Yes side, the first decision was.

(* it's usually said by the people who are currently benefiting from this particular quirk of the electorate)

In the case of something like the euro, it's relatively easy to fan opposition to the costs of saving it, because those are the costs we're paying. We're not paying the far larger costs of not saving it, and that makes the mental comparison completely skewed - which makes saving the euro unpopular because of the costs of doing so, even though it remains necessary because of the higher costs of not doing so. The right thing for a government to do is to go with the option that costs their people less, even if it's unpopular because people are mentally comparing apples and oranges. That's what governments are for, and it's one reason why they have a multi-year mandate - so that they can do necessary but unpopular things.

Nearly all of us can spot the fact that a government that does only what is popular is a bad government, but that doesn't stop many of us complaining about a 'lack of democracy' or a 'lack of mandate' when the government does something we personally object to. It's not a lack of democracy or a lack of mandate - it's part of how the system works. Governments are bound by the best interests of the country, and by the rules of law, not by the day to day flux of public opinion - the more they pay attention to the latter, in general, the worse they actually are at the former.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw wrote: »

Eh, don't bother hunting for a list of bondholders, unless it's a new one. If you're referring to that rather nice picture list with the Anglo bank logo in the background, don't bother, it's rubbish. And, yes, I can give you chapter and verse on that: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=70717812&postcount=18

In fact, that picture is exactly the kind of thing I mean - like most people, you probably have no idea of the provenance of the list, who's behind it, who leaked it, what it's actually a list of, or what it actually means. You certainly have no idea what kind of sums might be involved, because the list doesn't contain that information (although the original creator of the list had that information) - yet you regard it as proof of an almost entirely unrelated claim, that the German banks filled up Irish banks with money. And even if that list was exactly what most people think it is (and it isn't even that) it still wouldn't come within a mile of proving what you take it as evidence for.

All that list is evidence of is of just how easy it is to fool the public.

cordially,
Scofflaw