A Place to Stand

   Czech President Vaclav Klaus' 8 point programme for Europe:

1. Europe has to get rid of the unproductive and paternalistic soziale Marktwirtschaft, “augmented” (which means further undermined) by the growing role of the green ideology.



2. Europe should accept that the economic adjustment processes take time and that the impatient politicians and governments usually make things worse. The politicians should not try to mastermind the markets, to micromanage the economy, to “produce” growth by government stimuli and incentives.


3. Europe should start preparing comprehensive reductions of government spending and forget flirting with solutions based on tax increases. The reductions must dominantly deal with mandatory expenditures, because discretionary spending cuts are – as a long term solution – quantitatively more or less insignificant.


4. Europe should interrupt the creeping, but constantly expanding green legislation. The Greens must be stopped from taking over much of our economy under the banner of such flawed ideas as the global warming doctrine.


5. Europe should get rid of the excessive centralization, harmonization, standardization of the continent and after half a century of such measures start decentralizing, deregulating and desubsidizing its society and economy.


6.Europe should make it possible for countries which are the victims of the European monetary union to leave it and to return to their own monetary arrangements.


7.Europe should forget such plans as a fiscal union or a banking union, not to speak about antidemocratic ambitions to politically unify the whole continent.


8. Europe should return to democracy which can exist only at the level of nation-states, not at the level of the whole continent. It requires returning from supranationalism to intergovernmentalism.

  I wish our Prime Minister had 1% as much understanding or indeed principle.

  Underlinings are my own. This does fit with my 24 point programme. Mine has more specific technological solutions (nuclear power, X-Prizes, modular housing, automated rail) and thus shows more space for statism than his more broad principles. But I doubt if he would disagree with any of them, it is just that such a speech is not the place for so much detail.

   The Czechs are the most civilised and all round comptent nation south of Scandanavia. It is their great historic misfortune that they are largely surrounded by a sea of Germans while we are surrounded by one of open water.