A recent voting intention survey in the Netherlands foresees the possible e historic victory of an agrarian party who has championed the Dutch rebellion against the endless, excessive and often absurd interference by the European Commission in the exemplary agriculture of the country of the polders, which invented itself by reclaiming land from the sea and not following the plans and directives of remote committees. All of Europe is full of people fed up with European regulations, from peasants to industrialists, who flourish with the exuberant, stinging uselessness of brambles in a rainy spring. The paradoxical faith of liberal Europe in Soviet-style planning
Why does the EU have to regulate everything from chicken farming to chip manufacturing so that there is less of everything? Why this rule of meddling, regulating, ordering, planning what worked before the eurocracy gave birth to a new paralyzing regulation? It is necessary to regulate and order the market, but why do it through rules that have proven useless in many cases, as a result of minds more suited to the Soviet Five-Year Plans than to the continent that discovered the virtues of economic freedom, free initiative and spontaneous creativity? If the Industrial Revolution had depended on bureaucratic regulations like the ones Brussels emits by the ton, we would still be riding in horse-drawn carriages, even though they would be wearing panties eco friendly and there would be an Equine Rights Directive monitored by numerous committees and observatories. Such is the spirit of paralysis of initiative and political correctness that is dominant in the Brussels Eurocracy.
Why this rule of meddling, regulating, ordering, planning what worked before the eurocracy gave birth to a new paralyzing regulation?
One of the first serious setbacks of the then Common Market was trying to impose pasteurized milk cheeses, upsetting millions of cheese lovers and provoking a solemn French veto; they also tried to ban the sale of apples below a certain size, outraging the Danes over one of their own that was highly prized. There are many examples of similar blunders: they almost wiped out the vultures because of the ban on leaving animal carcasses in the fields, and farmers have lost the freedom to grow or raise what they want.
The latest in this invasive bureaucratic logic were recent statements by Commissioners warning Big Digital Tech, with faces of sly satisfaction, that in order to work in the EU they will have to abide by each and every slow and innumerable standards and directives. What does not seem to worry the Commission is that Europe does not have a company comparable to Amazon, Google or Microsoft, nor Twitter, Facebook or Tik-Tok, despite the fact that computing was invented in Europe and the first successful mobile phone was the work of the Finnish Nokia. They seem content with being the first in the world to manufacture standards and regulations and with exporting the productive industry to countries that are less prudish in the matter, because the exaggerated multiplication of regulations makes European industrial development more expensive and hinders and advises technological entrepreneurs to try in the United States, Japan, Israel and even China. If we add the restraint of the economic nationalism of each country, which continues to try to protect their declining companies, without there being true European companies, economic decline is served. It is essential, but the Union is sclerotic and is fed by bureaucrats
Understand me, I believe that the European Union is absolutely necessary. But he suffers from early sclerosis that manifested itself shortly after birth: excessive bureaucracy, duplication and tripling of organisms -Why does there have to be a European Commission and a Council of the European Union, which overlap in functions and representation?-, little control and evaluation of practical results, too far from the legitimate interests of European companies, and also excessive of cultural narcissism. It is enough for us to imagine ourselves the world champions of protective regulation of any real or imagined entity, from the environment to trans rights, believing that a glorious past as the axis of the world compensates for the current dependency – what would we have done in Ukraine without NATO? and the United States?- and the unstoppable tendency to be the periphery of the new world axis of the Pacific that unites and confronts China and the United States.
The European Union is one of the most admirable inventions in political history: it has succeeded in a very short time in closely linking countries with a long history of wars and mortal hatreds, putting them to work not just keeping the peace with each other, but doing things together. It’s a pity that the proliferation of rules, directives, committees, offices and other paraphernalia is the thing we know how to do best.
The European Union is one of the most admirable inventions in political history: in a very short time it has managed to closely link countries with a very long history of wars and deadly hatred
The least luminous and meanest part of the European Union arises from the difficulties of executing projects of true general interest. The national one continues to dominate, and of course that of the dominant nations: Germany and France, with very serious internal problems. The EU is no longer a club of nation-state governments who fight for their own interests and with a long statist tradition. After all, the majority of Spaniards, Italians, French and Germans are convinced that it is better for the State to take care of their lives than to take care of the State and draw red lines for him so that he does not meddle in private initiatives, do not favor the inbred ruling class and do not paralyze the spontaneous creativity of social life, without which democracy and economic freedom are in danger.
Take, for example, the absurd failures of the energy decarbonisation strategy: it was taken for granted that the transition to an electrified economy was easy, that it could be planned as if chance and changes in the economic cycle did not count, neither are the great differences between countries (How can the same plan work for Greece and Sweden?). The wishes were resolved and guaranteed by the paperwork and the disney speeches.
Thus, in the case of electric cars there is more voluntarism and blind faith in centralized planning than anything else. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine – which took the EU completely by surprise despite NATO’s warnings – have been enough for the house of cards to threaten to collapse. And what is worse, the European reaction has been… Negotiating a new directive banning internal combustion engines without ensuring a realistic change in technology! (electric, hydrogen, hydrofuels, mixed?)! Directives that also olympically ignore the growing divergences of purchasing power of the people of both countries, and that in any case few electric cars have been sold even among the rich.
It is obvious that reality will prevail, bureaucratic and unrealistic plans will fail and that, as a result, Europe will become more dependent on third-party industries and technologies, especially the United States once the Cold War with China has started. The bad thing is that they will try to fix it with more and more negotiated directives between governments of increasingly irrelevant nations, and who seem to have forgotten what this was about creating a revolutionary, vital, imaginative and realistic political Union.
