Much Ado About...What?

Greece is on the verge of collapse, and threatening to take the Euro with it. Well, gloom, despair, and agony on me.

We at The Sublime to the Ridiculous do not pretend to be experts on monetary policy issues. Quite frankly, they strike us as profoundly dull and boring. But nevertheless, there may be something of interest in the entire debacle.

Greece, as with many members of the European Union (16 out of 27, if memory and a quick Google search are to be trusted), has adopted the Euro as its means of exchange. Yes, we realize that a collective yawn has developed at the announcement of this striking news. But see what lies beyond it: when a nation using a currency held common with may other nations has a problem, then everyone associated with the crisis is in a deep hole too.

So we see the European Union, that fascist ideal of a world power, worrying that an economic collapse in Greece may bring them all down, and perhaps even take the world economy with it. This strikes us as fear mongering, yet such would not tell the entire story. The salient point here being that who controls the currency controls you. Should anyone want to give up control of their money to someone or something else, they are playing with fire.

Would a financial crisis in the relative backwater of Greece be so critical if the cash flow of so many other countries were not involved? Who knows for certain, but likely not. Centralization, among other things, centralizes problems. So rather than having one nation of dozens in Europe with a severe economic problem, we have many nations facing calamity. And the larger the problem in Europe is, the more likely it is to affect everyone else.

If Europe were to let Greece be responsible for Greece we might avoid the potential for widespread injury. But we must unite, we must socialize our political and economic processes. If we do not hang together we shall surely hang separately.

But at least then we would have to be taken to the gallows one at a time.