@urb-nist
@mitigatedchaos What do you know about Europeans? We have some sort of hate-love for you guys.
Look, mate.
Trump complaints from Euros just convince Trump’s base that Trump is on the right path, especially in the form of “brainless narcissist” etc.
It often goes hand-in-hand with an idea of Europeans as the more Cultured and Refined civilization - but the kinds of people that expressed those ideas in America are also the ones put their cultural and economic interests ahead of the Rust Belt voters that gave Trump the Presidency, and frequently insulted them (and celebrated their demographic replacement).
Trump’s base has a negative amount of trust for them.
So that makes the post a good opportunity to dunk on the European Union as a project by pointing out the irony involved.
The reason the US dollar functions well despite spanning a continent, while the Euro has contributed to the collapse in Greece, is a combination of US Federal government spending and higher labor mobility, which evens out the spread of dollars. The spending and issuing of currency are unified at the same level of government, allowing them to work together. (This can also kinda work with some separation if the economies are similar enough.)
That is not the case in the EU, where the currency issuing and government spending are separated, and the government performance levels are quite dissimilar.
To unify them, it would be necessary to shift even more power to the EU government (which is apparently happening). To make a true European Federation, not a mere European Union. That would make Europe much more similar to America in structure.
Secondly, it requires the increased labor mobility. Cultural uniqueness grows in environments with friction that allow drift from other cultures and cuts the rate of memetic transmission, and the increased overhead of communication, up to a certain level, makes business harder rather than easier. (Think language barriers as an example.)
So all those people moving around to where the money is will start to converge on a more unified culture as a means of doing business more easily (like having only one or two languages that they all share!), just like in the United States of America. Cultural traditions will spread more quickly and widely, meaning there will be fewer of them. Cultural preferences, too, will be more evenly distributed throughout the Continent.
Plus this whole thing about “increasing diversity” by importing large numbers of foreigners like America will also erode the local traditions as they do not share them. Instead, they’ll buy into the new broader Euroculture.
So Europeans are complaining about the American President while taking the steps required to make Europe much more like America - eventually France and Germany will be no more different from each other than New York state and Illinois.
Anyhow, only going halfway at it is actually even worse, as it causes things like the situation in Greece. Either be a true Federation or be independent nations.
And yes, I know not all European countries are in the EU, or have the same level of integration into the EU. After all, Britain kept the Pound (a decision I agree with).
