"Besides, the way America's public schools are sliding, they'll all be this way in a few months. I say, lay back and enjoy it - it's a helluva toboggan ride" - Superintendent Chalmers, The Simpsons.
At the time of writing (and, for that matter, for the foreseeable future if not outright perpetuity), the fallout from #Brexit continues.
In my column last week, I sought to address the weaponized misperception that all support for, enthusiasm about or empathy in the general direction of Britain leaving the E.U. had to be motivated by racist sentiment. But thinking about the issue over the previous seven days, another - even greater - misperception has come to light.
That there was actually some sort of semi-mythical choice on offer to maintain the extant allegedly-working status quo in the first place.
Let's be clear about this. That's not what the Remain option was effectively offering; and for one simple reason: the European Union as we know it is fundamentally creaking at the seams. Ever since the Common Market became the Eurozone with the adoption of the single currency and simultaneous necessarily correlated abrogation of individual member-states' monetary sovereignty, there have been an escalating - spiraling, even - set of problems for many of the less-well-off economies which comprise Europe's southern rim.
The poster-child for how ever-closer-union failed in practice was, of course, Greece. Even leaving aside the dread impacts of a lack of the standard currency devaluation option to which an economy can resort in times of fiscal crisis to try and spur some measure of domestic growth; the inability of the Greek government to set or seriously influence its own monetary policy - its own interest rates, investment regulations, money supply and all the rest that goes with that - seriously hamstrung any indigenous Hellenic efforts to meaningfully respond to the crisis then gripping Europe.
Instead, Greece's monetary policy was effectively set in Germany and the other more well-off and less hard hit northern and western members of the Euro club. And while the conditions the European policy-elite thusly rolled out might have been about right for the large and robust virile economies of Germany et co, they were piteously inadequate for attempting to assist the Greeks to get back some modicum of stability - let alone growth and recovery. That's the trouble with attempting to run a continent-spanning monetary union and thus, consequently, a single monetary policy encapsulating an incredibly broad range of differing local economies. Local needs and diversity of circumstance simply get lost amidst the 'big picture' (or, less charitably, are overlooked in favour of catering to the economic needs of the 'big players' whose picture, increasingly, it seems to be).
Making matters worse, as part of the deal by which Greece managed to stabilize at the political and monetary equivalent of death's door thanks to massive (and largely German) economic assistance, the Greeks suddenly found themselves in the unenviable position of having their FISCAL rather than just their monetary policy effectively dictated to them and run from elsewhere in the Eurozone. We all saw how that turned out.
Now I don't just mention this because it's an actually-extant case-study in how the E.U. has historically mismanaged not just a crisis but the needs of an ailing member state. Instead, I draw attention to it because what happened to Greece - in the sense of an escalating surrender of fiscal policy to unelected or foreign Eurocrats to go along with the previously handed over control of monetary policy - is the inevitable pathway further forward for the Eurozone as a whole.
You can't run an ever-closer economic union without an ever more centralized degree of direction for both fiscal AND monetary policy that applies across largely the whole union. To suggest otherwise is tantamount to insinuating that the successful economies such as Germany - whose money, it seems, is increasingly spent subsidizing the state budgets of less salubrious member-states to the south - ought to have a limited degree of say over how what effectively amounts to their own domestic tax-take is spent in their own backyard. Perhaps this is the right thing to advocate - but good luck getting the Germans to agree to that.
More likely, in the not too distant future we are going to see serious proposals put forward for Eurozone-wide taxes, and a European treasury in order to fund such things as European internal spending and control European fiscal policy, in a way similar to and perhaps explicitly modeled on how monetary policy is already centralized and constrained. Perhaps that is why the translation to the phrase Merkel used to refer to the E.U. in a speech recently was more properly rendered "European Unification Project" rather than "European Union". Because this is already being thought about.
The other option, of course, is to go diametrically the other way. Conclude that the Eurozone experiment in its present form has not exactly worked for a number of European economies, and that it might well be time to curtail it and roll it back - at least for those states who have not done particularly well out of it. Certainly, countries such as Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland prove that it's perfectly possible to remain party to the Common Market without having to 'render unto Caesar' by all adopting the same coinage. (Although interestingly, the E.U.'s position on the Treaty of Maastricht is that joining the Euro is not something E.U. member-states are supposed to have a choice over)
Further, 'Renegade Economist' and general Man Against Time Yanis Varoufakis' "Plan B" to save Greece economically proposed in extremis to do exactly that.
But is this likely to take place? In stark contrast to much of the rest of the course of human history, will the technocrats of Europe realize that they're half-in a hole and start scrabbling frantically to get out rather than pushing further on, Pooh-bear style in the hopes that the hole leads somewhere wondrous?
I find it unlikely. Nobody wishes to admit they've made a mistake - particularly when it's a continent-spanning, decades-encapsulating, Zeitgeist-embracing colossus of a potential botch-up.
The response to the twin (and ongoing) European crises of serious economic malaise and states weighing up their options 'on the outside', then, may therefore be cast as one of two options: "All In", or "Fold".
If "All In", then Brexit voters were quite vindicated by seeking to put the brakes on further British integration (particularly sans democratic mandate - the referendum result in 1975 never talked about any of this). A "Remain" vote was cast as being an endorsement for the 'status quo', but as I've hopefully sketched out ... the status quo was unsustainable and the center cannot hold.
If, on the other hand, "Fold" becomes the dominant paradigm du jour (whether for the Eurozone at large - which is fairly catastrophically unlikely; or for more peripheral member-states, the odds of which are increased) ... then Britain has not done something singularly self-mutilating. Instead, it has merely pre-empted what will shortly be a swathe of rumblings from other disgruntled E.U. states.
To quote Death in Good Omens ... "DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING [...] JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH".
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