What Now for "Europe"? Why the People Failed Their Masters

Artigo de Anthony de Jasay na Library of Economics and Liberty.

The motives for voting “the wrong way” were kaleidoscopic, but two major ones stand out. One was the idea, encouraged by the authors of the document and the media which assisted its birth with loud applause, that a modern constitution is above all a list of what people have a “right” to get from their government (and never mind where the government gets them from in order to give them to the people). Despite the mouth-watering list of good things promised them in the “Charter of Fundamental Rights” which forms the most extravagant part of the document, the people were still disappointed: there were not enough “social” promises of levelling upward. The list was not rich enough. “Europe” was not going to be sufficiently insulated from “inhuman”, “blind” market forces. On the contrary, it was to be liberal or, as is critics insist, “ultra-liberal”, enshrining rules of free competition and thus undermining even the present level of “workers’ rights”. In particular, it does not require all member states, notably the ten new East-Central European ones, to raise their taxes and social welfare entitlements to the Franco-German level, thus allowing free rein to “social dumping” and the luring of productive business and employment from West to East.