David Davis
About eleven years ago, I was in a newsgroup called “eurofaq”: I believe it still to be in operation somewhere (probably on yahoogroups now if you want to go searching.) To enliven our internal exchanges with intelligence from elsewhere, I had various run-ins with some starry-eyed young people from something called “YEM”.
To do this, I used to go and lurk on their groups under the name of Jacques Bommaerts, a Belgian “student”, occsionally surfacing to ask seemingly naive questions about the forthcoming Euro, such as how one currency could be imposed on 15 nations – remember! We in the UK were to be for it too! – without either elections or referenda, and under what economic parameters it was to operate.
The responses of enraged and indignant uproar were fun to behold.
Eventually I was rumbled. Years before most of us knew about internetty-stuff, a clever-clogs on the Enemy Staff worked out that my IP address was the same as an identifiable member of eurofaq, and I was expelled from the YEM crowd amid showers of rotting cyber-cabbages and virtual-tomatoes. But the fun lasted about a year.
At the end, on my exit, I bet one of them £25 that the Euro, starting about 70p, would be under 50p by Christmas. unfortunately it wasn’t and I had to pony up, which I did.
And now, today, we have this Simon Heffer analysis – of where the Euro, and indeed the entire fascist EU project, stands.
Years pass, and I might even have been dead by now, but I’m not, which is fortunate. I have lived to see the day when the Euro might actually come undone, be toast, totalled. Another Rouble-type experiment to actually bite the dust…and in my lifetime too.
Actually, it’s very sad: I have lived to see that modern people _still_ let their governments get away with not learning the lessons of History. This is the main problem that I think should concern libertarians, if we are at some distant time to form the very kind of administration which sets out to cull most of the State.
A major philosophical battle will need to take place about de-sovietisation of money, so that no further disastrous monetary union experiments are tried.
