Social Europe

Thanks for clarifying.

> It should be as easy as possible, if the goal is to have an efficient market.

I'd argue that the goal was never to just have an efficient market, for there's absolutely no reason to have a market to begin with, unless society at large benefits from it (not just the employers and the employees, since they don't exist and operate in isolation). The employees, who are real people rather than - or before they are - legal entities, absolutely need protecting. Their bodies can break, their time is limited, and they have tangible and intangible needs that have existed before - and will exist after - businesses were a thing. But once we've adopted this economic model, market efficiency is certainly an aspect to it, agreed. However, it still can't be the most important factor or even one more important than individual rights and their wellbeing.

As such, I'd agree that selling one's own services/skill (labour) should generally be easy, but a fairly long list of failsafes is still unavoidable and necessary simply because businesses are predatory entities by their very nature (a necessary evil, it could be argued), especially after the onset of neoliberalism in the 80s, and there's an inherent imbalance of bargaining power between employers and employees. [0][1][2][3]

Labour is not just a market commodity because the seller is a person embedded in family/community. So I am all for giving employees (but not employers) more control over this relationship…

Here is a pressing problem for the United Nations: end a major war that threatens the UN itself. The UN is primarily an institution about peace. If peace exists, individual states and collections of states can take care of their pressing problems. Quoting Branko Milanovic:

> The second reason for the decline of the UN and international organisation is ideological. According to the ideologies of neoliberalism and ‘the end of history’ which so heavily dominated the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, dealing with world peace and security was no longer the most pressing task of the UN. Helped by the proliferation of non-governmental organisations (and false NGOs), the new ideologues broadened the mission of the UN to many subsidiary issues with which it should have never been involved but rather left to other governmental and non-governmental bodies.[]

>

> The third, related reason is financial. As the mandate of the UN, the World Bank and other international institutions was broadened to include practically everything imaginable, it became obvious that the resources provided by governments were insufficient. Here NGOs met billionaires and private-sector donors. In a series of actions unthinkable when the UN was created, private interests simply infiltrated themselves into organisations created by states and began to dictate the new agenda.

>

> This is how the entire UN system went into decline and we ended up in a position where the head of the only…

Greece = 2% of EU GDP
Puerto Rico = 0.006% of US GDP

Both of these default decisions are more ideologically driven (setting precedents) than they are borne of actual economic necessity, such as the TBTF bank bailouts of 2008.

In Greece's case it's not even the private sector's problem anymore as debt restructuring transferred debt from the banks to the EFSF, an entity funded by public, gov't funds (mostly German, French, & Italian). [0] It's fantastic to see how these debt restructuring deals really work. In essence, creditors wrote down 25% of the debt in order to transfer private risk that they had taken on themselves onto the public.

So the direct losers in the case of a Greek default are the taxpayers and, by the transitive property, the politicians of Germany, France and Italy. Indirectly it would be a blow to investor confidence in the EU, but many would probably see Greece leaving the EU as a positive for the overall EU economy and the Euro.

[0] http://www.socialeurope.eu/2012/03/the-mystery-tour-of-restructuring-greek-sovereign-debt/

All over this thread you seem to mention potential trade benefits for the UK based on being separate from the EU. Can you name some benefits (perhaps let's say 3) that you expect will be negotiated more favourably for the UK within a year that the UK was unable to get as part of the EU.

Also ... being part of a a trade bloc always has benefits and positives, but the two key negatives touted as 'deal-breakers' in the Brexit negotiations have been related to (1) sovereignty and (2) concessions. A few weeks ago Peter Verovšek wrote a short but pretty good article on effectively the illusion of sovereignty (https://www.socialeurope.eu/brexit-and-the-misunderstanding-of-sovereignty) for the UK, and in terms of concessions it seems that a small nation with limited resources hardly makes a net loss by being part of a larger trade bloc: access to a huge market while exposing a small market of your own.

Germany is successful because it kept its manufacturing jobs through the collaboration of capital and trade unions: the capitalists kept the factories in Germany, and the unions accepted wage restrictions [1][2] to stay internationally competitive. This is quite unlike SV capitalism, but neither does it look like the opposite, which would be socialism. The best description of it is corporatism.

Of course, this also means that the benefits of Germany's roaring performance in international trade have trouble reaching regular Germans.

As for happiness, the recent election results do not look like the choice of a population which is content with the current course.

[1]: https://www.socialeurope.eu/was-german-wage-undercutting-deliberate

[2]: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/a-share-of-future-profits-german-employees-exchange-wage-cuts-for-equity-a-640304.html

> Interest rates (which Greece now has the highest in the European Union)

The averaged interest rates are actually fairly low for Greece as a lot of its bonds are held by European institutions with very good conditions. The effective interest rate is at 2.4%, slightly lower than even Germanys effective rate. The more interesting value is the debt-service burden, but even though that's higher for Greece, it's still in the same ballpark (it's about the level that the US have).

Still, the debt is horribly high and I don't see a way to repay it. I also don't see a way that Greece can meaningfully default without leaving the EU. That's impossible to sell to Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland or might trigger a landslide. Maybe a unified fiscal policy could help. We live in interesting times.

see http://www.socialeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/OP6.pdf