The vice president of the European Parliament, Senor Alejo Vidal-Quadras, has called for the Spanish military to put down Catalonia’s attempt to place a separation referendum on the upcoming election ballot. Catalonia is a province of Spain, whose GNP is larger than either Portugal or Ireland. It was a sovereign country itself for two short years in the 1930s.
Just as individual nations are chaffing at what seems to be unstoppable plans to force a centralized government on currently sovereign countries in a futile attempt to save the overly ambitious “European Project”, provinces within currently sovereign countries are chaffing at their own national government’s fiscal mismanagement. The Basque province of Spain has been most boisterous for independence for many years, but now Catalonia, a much more important industrial province, has taken the lead.
It is typical of those whose current policies have failed to seek ever more coercive power over larger geographic areas as the solution. Napoleon sought to unite Europe with his army after the French Revolution deteriorated into the socialist nightmare of the guillotine. Hitler and Stalin tried to conquer Europe after the failures of their two forms of socialism, national socialism and international socialism. Now, as Europe deteriorates economically, the European Union pleas for greater powers over banking and demands direct taxing power over the people of sovereign countries via an open-ended financial transaction tax. None of these measures will solve the crisis, because they do not address the underlying causes of the crisis–the increasingly socialistic tendency toward monetary and capital destruction that is the hallmark of the regulatory welfare state. Patrick Barron
