Watching Greece it occurs to me that the EU has a fatal flaw. A single flaw that the United States does not have, a flaw that would have caused the American experiment to have gone down in flames. It is a flaw of bureaucracy, not ideology.
The EU countries have to, for the most part, field their own armies, provide their own social services, take care of their own infrastructure, etc. The only system which has benefited from "economy of scale" in the EU is the financial system. It's as if Alabama had to build its own highways, field its own army, and provide social services. Of course Alabama would be in debt up to its eyeballs. And this is, in part, why Greece is in such dire straits. In this scenario, if it happened in the USA, Alabama would have rich states like New York and California on their back the way Greece has Germany on their back.
The EU is a group of nations with a common currency and that's about it. That means no nation within the EU can use temporary currency manipulation in tough times. The USA does that any time the economy isn't so hot, as does just about any other nation with a sovereign currency. Greece cannot do that, can they? Whether or not you agree with this method ideologically, if one nation can do it but another cannot, the nation that can has a huge advantage when things get weird economically. "Printing money", as it is often called, can inject cash into the economy and, assuming it causes inflation, it can lower the real value of a nation's debt. Again, Greece cannot do this. Alabama doesn't have to do this kind of thing because they receive a greater amount of funds from the federal government than they pay in. No such luck for Greece.
I don't know if this was an unintended consequence or if there were factions which knew this was going to happen as the EU was created. I am not really old enough to know off the top of my head what was going on in Greece, or in other nations, as the EU formed. I imagine there was push back, but I can't find anything about the main point I have here. Nobody mentioned that only the monetary system was going to be unified, nobody talked about what happens to the less prosperous nations as the economy goes south, which it inevitably will do under any system. It's Greece today, but any other country that goes through extreme economic hardship is bound to suffer the same fate under the current EU regime which centralizes economic power but keeps the political power of the individual disparate by pitting nation against nation in the new economic order.
