(no subject)

[naath]

Sundays are for arguing with phoning my parents.

So today's annoyance is that Dad hates the EU. Go the EU! (I can't seem to come up with a natty chant). True it could be better - like, it could be more democratic, for instance; but a lot of the ways I think it could be be better mean more EU not less.. But it's beet >50 years since the Germans have been at war with the French, that has to count for something right?

It's not that I find euroskepticism entirely impossible to understand mind, I just disagree with it.

(Bring on the USE :-p)

Comments

[gerald_duck]

When talking about the Common Market or similar, I think it's important to distinguish two kinds of commonality.

The first is free trade areas — a freedom from import or export duties, such that manufacturing can be mobile within a community. The second is consumer harmonisation, in particular laws that good offered for sale in country A must be purchasable by residents of country B.

The latter is actually somewhat problematic. While it might seem unfair, say, for a DVD player to cost more in the UK than in Greece, and for the manufacturer to prohibit Greek models being bought mail-order by Brits, this does serve the important purpose of downregulating the cost of living in Greece, while still allowing the manufacturer to make a profit.

If their profit has to be the same on any unit they sell to any EU citizen, we in the UK get cheaper DVD players, but the Greeks end up paying more. It's a fallacy that the manufacturer can sustain that lower profit margin across all their sales.

Similarly, mobility of labour is a pretty big problem. A couple of years ago I was driven from my office to the garage where my car was being serviced by a Czech guy who used to be an I.T. Manager. He was clearly well educated and articulate in English, and freely admitted he wanted a job more suited to his skills. But he was driving a taxi because he could earn more driving a taxi in the UK than managing I.T. in the Czech Republic. The net effect is that the UK has too many taxi drivers and the Czech Republic has a shortage of I.T. Managers.

Harmonisation itself doesn't cause equality, as the current fubar in Greece shows quite clearly. There need to be strong redistributive policies like the ones Germany adopted on reunification. But for those to be politically acceptable there needs to be a strong social bond between the people making the sacrifice and the people receiving the benefit. Germany reunified because it was ideologically important: there was a strong sense of a nation divided rather than two nations. I can't imagine the Germans being prepared to take a huge hit in GDP for a decade in order to unify with Greece.

[chess]

I'm thinking of a different kind of consumer harmonisation to you, I think. I'm thinking of the kind of consumer harmonisation where the DVD player that you make in Greece and sell in the UK has to be up to the same safety and quality standards as the DVD player that you make in the UK and sell in the UK...

But then again I support strong redistributive policies (they even upgrade the total world productivity, generally, I think?).