in defense of the EU

A chilling reminder of why all of us europeans need to support the EU...
Slovaks or otherwise (and particularly the Brits...)

'But any complacency should be shattered by reading Stefan Zweig's chilling
autobiography, The World of Yesterday, written in 1942. The Austrian author
describes how the golden age of security that accompanied the first wave of
globalisation rapidly descended into the barbarism of two world wars.

There was as little belief in the possibility of wars between the peoples
of Europe as there was in witches and ghosts, Zweig wrote of pre-1914
Vienna.

Our fathers honestly believed that the divergences and boundaries between
nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity ... Now
that the great storm has long since smashed it, we finally know that the
world of security was naught but a castle of dreams; my parents lived in it
as if it had been a house of stone.'

what the USA wants to become

What most countries want their future to be like...

This new American economy, Larry Summers hopes, will be “more export-oriented” and “less consumption-oriented”; “more environmentally oriented” and “less energy-production-oriented”; “more bio- and software- and civil-engineering-oriented and less financial-engineering-oriented”; and, finally, “more middle-class-oriented” and “less oriented to income growth that is disproportionate towards a very small share of the population”. Unlike many other economists, Summers does not believe that lower growth is the inevitable price of this economic paradigm shift.

the problem ofcourse is that everyone wants the same things and in the end nobody wants to import, the end game of which will probably be protectionism of various forms.






note: Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist and the Director of the White House's National Economic Council for President Barack Obama.^[1] Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is the 1993 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal for his work in several fields of economics and was Secretary of the Treasury for the last year and a half of the Clinton Administration.