Re: The continuing battle against the inevitable Euro area default
Not catching up on .Org threads because my forum time is spent on reading your Quicksilver. Damn you GC /shakes fist in anger
Oh dear, I’m not ignoring you Philipvs, not as a person, I simply do not care to devolve into your type of arguments, where the main focus is, in my opinion of course, not clarifying viewpoints, but rather the raising of easily disproved yet very, very obsessive objections in desperate bids to avoid making any concession to the logic or facts.Originally Posted by PVC
As to your allegations, it speaks to the state of the general political debate today that your average public has such a limited horizon of interpretation that it can only place a benign assertion as being pro or against fascism.
On that note, I keep saying that we really, really have to create an 26ptBoldIronicFont, else wit is totally wasted on you lot.
I posted the remarks to which you so object in the hope that someone in this thread crawling with Brits will recognize the paraphrasing and cheer up on being reminded of the amazingly good, most widely known British television political satire of all time and Thatcher’s declared favourite, Yes Minister, the two paragraphs being some of the program’s most infamous quips.
Hell, I even placed a wink before the first one by writing: /theatrically pretends to faint
Just to make sure no freak could miss the irony, I placed before the second the caveat: hidden reference.
And here are the actual quotes – providing larger quotes from the original, since they are so hilarious.
Yes Minister
*The discussion takes place between two Civil Servants*
Bernard Woolley: I don't know if I want power.
Sir Humphrey: If the right people don't have power, do you know what happens? The wrong people get it! Politicians, councillors, ordinary voters!
Bernard Woolley: But aren't they supposed to in a democracy?
Sir Humphrey: This is a British democracy, Bernard!
Bernard Woolley: How do you mean?
Sir Humphrey: British democracy recognises that you need a system to protect the important things of life and keep them out of the hands of the barbarians! Things like the Opera, Radio 3, the countryside, the law, the universities... BOTH of them. And we are that system!
Bernard Woolley: Gosh!
Sir Humphrey: We run a civilised, aristocratic government machine tempered by occasional general elections. Since 1832, we have been gradually excluding the voter from government. Now we've got them to a point where they just vote once every five years for which buffoons will try to interfere with OUR policies and you are happy to see all that thrown away?
Bernard Woolley: Well, no, no, I didn't mean...
Sir Humphrey: Bernard, do you want the Lake District turned into a gigantic caravan site? The Royal Opera House into a bingo hall? The National Theatre into a carpet sale warehouse? Do you want Radio 3 to broadcast pop music 24 hours a day? How would you feel if they took all the culture programmes off television?
Bernard Woolley: I never watch them.
Sir Humphrey: Well, neither do I, but it's vital to know that they're there!
My paraphrase
hidden reference The goal we should aim for in the next half a century is to run a civilised, technocratic government machine, only tempered by occasional general elections. Brussels is for the next few decades a supra-national organism. Therefore, it must seek to gradually exclude the voter from government, up to the point where it picks every few years whichever pack of incompetents will volunteer to interfere with European policy and send them to Brussels.
Yes Minister
Jim Hacker: It’s the public will. This is a democracy. And the people don’t like it.
Sir Humphrey: The people are ignorant and misguided.
Jim Hacker: Humphrey, it was the people who elected me.
*Sir Humphrey smiles suggestively*
My paraphrase
/theatrically pretends to faint My dear chap, where do you get these ideas?!
Europe is not ready for direct democracy. Petty nationalism would run rampant.
The people are ignorant and misguided. Case in point: it is the people who elect the politicians you so despise in the first place.
Of course, I had to run into the one Brit whose beliefs and sense of humour are, I suppose, the exceptions which prove the positive stereotype regarding British wit.
No worries, I know your Christian humility does not allow you to apologize.
By the by, for one turning so red-faced in a previous debate that he couldn’t help himself from correcting me:
Your posts are generally perplexing – the latest:It's Wyclif with one "F", not two. If you want to be anachronistic you could go with Wycliffe.
Not to put too fine a point on it, yet while I am not sure my English is good enough for me to pass for a Brit, yours would easily allow you to pass for a RomanianWell, if I ever needed proof NowaRke was an elitist with no connection to the general population, I have it now in sapdes. I know you're ignoring me NowaRke, but you might like to consider how close your rhetoric is to classical political facism, particularly the bit about the ignorant plebs.
Through this response I hope to reply to Apache and Cecil as well.
The second part of my post simply addressed the lack of information many of the ones frothing at the mouth against the German golden rule seem to suffer from. And I re-quote, as it remains salient and your misinterpretations buried it with no cause:
You should have been cheering Germany’s initiatives.
Angela Merkel has not tired of repeating that member states’ budgetary policies should be placed under the authority of judges in Luxembourg with the power to sanction “fiscal sinners” - the compromise established on 5 December between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy has sidelined this solution.
This is a policy that is based on one of the most well-established schools of liberal thought, “ordoliberalism”, which emerged between the wars in Germany and was popularised in the postwar period as “the social market economy” by the influential Christian-Democrat Ludwig Erhard.
Michel Foucault identified the originality of this school of liberalism, which makes constitutional regulation and judges the levers and principle guarantors of the construction of a political order founded on a strict respect for economic freedom and free competition.
In the context of ‘a politics’ that is deemed incapable of creating a stable and predictable environment for economic operators, constitutional regulation (the much vaunted ‘golden rule’) is the sole instrument to combat the “temporal incoherences” of democratic governments. And it is in this context that the German proposal to place in the hands of judges budgetary power, which is a core competency of parliament, should be evaluated.
This school of thought is not new in Brussels. In the wake of several decades dominated by the ‘Monnet method’ which advocated entrusting the economic and political modernisation of the continent to an enlightened technocracy - that is not to say said technocracy cannot exist in the presence of ordoliberalism - it is easily forgotten that the European project also has roots in a judicial and economic ordoliberal credo that is still very much alive in Germany.
It is impossible to understand one of the pillars of European construction, which is the policy of free competition, without taking into account the close links maintained over many years with the milieu of German ordoliberalism. It should be said that these ideas provide the basis for a “strong Europe” and the reinforcement of supranational institutions: butonly on the express condition that such institutions maintain an apolitical independence, along the lines the European Central Bank or the European Court of Justice.
In short, the German proposal is much more than an ephemeral solution to an emergency situation. It is based on an authentic European federalist doctrine that aims to call a halt to the slow deployment of a democratic logic in the heart of supranational institutions, whose initial goal was economic modernisation.
As such, it would definitively put an end to repeated attempts to create a European political constitution, and pave the way for construction of an economic constitution in its stead.
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