How much has the government and politics of the EU changed in the last half decade?

[❄M❄]

Could you also underline any significant changes and occurrences? Thanks
Well, David. We all know that Europe hasn't made anywhere near as many mistakes recently as other places on this earth have. For example, USA, Middle East etc. We're doing very well compared to these places. BUT I asked about government and politics, not economy.

[David F]

I think the fact that unconstrained spending coupled with inconsistent fiscal policy is an unsustainable catastrophe has become generally understood throughout the EU. I also think the PIGS at least have come to understand that Germany is losing interest in paying for their profligate spending. All in not a bad five years movement up the learning curve.

[The discoverer]

But to answer your question, I have to talk about the economy.
The government is stable, but the economy isn't. In Greece, both the economy and government have taken a beating. This was the result of years of unsustainably increasing government spending and debt while inside a bubble. The bubble popped, and the country went into recession.

Angela Merkel didn't really change the politics of Europe. The Sarkozy-Merkel relationship changed during the crisis, but so far it seems all talk and no action. The disagreements between Cameron and the EU parliament marked a fundamental difference between the EU and England.

[Sienna]

Any paper money system enables the creation of money meaning pieces of paper, not money meaning real actual wealth. A paper money system does not function to *create* wealth. It functions to *redistribute wealth* from its owners, to political favourites.

The original idea of the European union was a common market. This idea of free trade is good. It means everyone in Europe benefits from cheaper good, higher real incomes and rising living standards if they want them. It means closer social co-operation among Europeans. It means you abolish trade barriers - uniformed thugs at borders, taking a cut of all production, banning this or that consensual transaction, and making goods more expensive and everyone poorer but themselves.

But for the last ten years, Europe has been on a fully fiat paper money system. "Fiat" can be translated as "government paper rubbish". Fiat money has only ever ended in massive fraud and the destruction of the value - and even the function - of money. It is simply a fraud, on a massive scale. It is an engine by which wealth is vacuumed - at the rate of inflation - from the great mass of society, and channelled to big banks cartelised for the purpose. The banks in turn channel it to favoured big corporations. This distorts the whole structure of production, away from what society prefers, sucking capital out of activities that satisfy the people's most urgent wants, as decided by them, and channelling the money into bubbles of privilege and parasitism, caused by manipulating the money supply.

The government and politics of the EU has significantly changed toward the activity of manipulating the money supply in the last half decade. The problems they face have been caused the government central banks licensing of fractional reserve banking. This permits the banks to do what would otherwise be illegal as fraud, namely, to print money substitutes way out of proportion to actual money on deposit. This in turn causes serious economic, social and moral problems, which describe current issues in EU politics. But because it never occurs to them to stop doing what's causing the problem - namely government inflating the money supply - they only ever think the solution is to try to steal some more money from some more suckers.

If they didn't think that, then they would abolish central banking.

Their central lie is what they answer every emergency with: we need to print more money.

But an increase in the money supply NEVER of itself increases net welfare. It doesn't make society better off, and all claims that it does are LIES. All it does is take from A and give to B, take from the productive owner, and give to the privileged parasite.

The solution is the one thing the statists conveniently never mention. Government's monopoly of the supply of money and credit should be abolished. Money is a market phenomenon. It should be supplied by the market, subject only to the ordinary old common law against force or fraud.