The German economics minister must be living on another planet if he thinks anyone is going to go for his plan:
We also need the possibility of an orderly bankruptcy States. Tellingly, the term "Resolvenz" is. Because the goal of this process is to restore the functioning of the State concerned, possibly by the temporary limitation of sovereignty. The Resolvenzverfahren should be conducted by an independent body, such as a continuously developed stabilization mechanism (ESM), the act would then be comparable with the International Monetary Fund.
Roesler goes on to say that there should be “no more taboos” in the debate. Perhaps one of the broken taboos could be a discussion about whether countries in Europe really want to be run by the Germans, and whether that question wasn’t answered well enough fifty years ago.
I’m not being entirely facetious, since the bottom line is that sovereignty always comes down to a question of force. If you don’t pay your taxes long enough, eventually someone with a gun will come and take your stuff away from you. It reminds me of a discussion I had with my eight year old the other day:
Kid: Why can’t we park here?
Me: Because we’d get a parking ticket?
Kid: What if you don’t pay the parking ticket?
Me: They’d go to court and demand that I pay
Kid: What if you still don’t pay?
Me: Eventually they would confiscate my car and not give it back until I pay.
Kid: What if you park the car inside our garage and don’t let anyone in?
Me: Eventually the police would come and take it
Kid: What if we don’t let them in?
Me: Well, they have the guns…
Kid: I hate the police.
And that’s how it goes…
Update: In case you think I’m exaggerating:
Germany’s EU commissioner Günther Oettinger said Europe should send blue helmets to take control of Greek tax collection and liquidate state assets.
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