THe NYT Opinion page includes recommends Germany leave the Euro?

(Referring to a posting elsewhere.)

Yes, it makes sense. Earlier last month I wrote a series of letters and posts recommending Germany pull out of the Euro myself. Mediterranean Europe and Germanic Europe are too different in culture, social structure, and values. Restore the DM. Leave the Euro to the southern countries who need it, and have similar social values, and are willing to fund those social values.

Currencies as they are currently used, are the primary means of social insurance and redistribution. People are naturally gregarious to their own ethnic groups and are naturally not gregarious with what they see as competing groups, and in particular, groups that they see as a permanent drain on their resources.

Because currencies are a means of social insurance they are inseparable from the social orders that employ them. Countries need their own currencies. The Spanish, Italians and Greeks can then maintain their historical poverty born of their less productive lifestyles, without impoverishing the north. Besides, the north has a new permanent semi-revolutionary underclass it is supporting at home to deal with.

The USA has a similar problem. It is a domestic empire over somewhere between four and six separate cultures, with entirely different economic interests, and cultural interests and political friction between them is becoming intolerable. The only reason that American government has functioned since the 1900s, is because of the two party system, and the south’s rejection of the republican party. With the south now more pragmatic, this prior balance has been shattered, and the country is increasingly a north and west against a south and interior. For exactly the same reasons as Europeans face these problems.

It is all well and good to believe in the myths of egalitarian secular humanism, while you’re living in a temporary era of post-war, then post-soviet prosperity. But western civilization no longer has it’s economic advantage over the rest of the world. The west will be permanently poorer, even if retaining it’s ordinal status, for some period of time, simply due to the northern European people’s ancient tendency to eschew corruption.

Since a currency is a reflection of social values, nations need their own currencies. The euro was a failure. Return to the DM.