The EU, in my eyes...

Ireland will probably cave in the face of all this pressure to take the EU bail-out money and will, as a result, surrender some of its fiscal and economic sovereignty in the process. This has been in the news a lot lately, and has made me look to the future of the EU as an association of free and sovereign states.

As it stands now, the European Union is very similar to the US under the Article of Confederation (prior to 1789). Each individual State maintains a high degree of sovereignty, and the central authority is very limited and/or ambiguous in its makeup. This proved unsustainable in the US... and is proving so again in Europe. It didn't work for the Commonwealth of Independent States that followed the death of the USSR, either... each nation found itself under-represented or excluded entirely from the decision making processes that directly effected the smaller, less populous nations involved.

Nations like Germany, the UK and France have the greatest influence, while smaller, less populous states like Ireland, Spain and the Czech Republic only have influence when they form coalitions and cooperate to get things done. Using the recent (and on-going) financial crisis as an example, we see the member states that benefit the most from EU interventionist policies supporting the policies, while states that question the loss of sovereignty and self determination are pressured and harassed to fall into step. Ireland, Denmark, the Baltic States and Spain are the best examples of nations that have flexed their nationhood against the rancorous calls of compliance from EU members who still benefit from the "agendas" of the EU... Poland, Portugal, Romania, Italy and Greece being the loudest. Is it any surprise that these members also have the most to gain in either fiscal assistance (Greece and Italy) or aide and support of failing infrastructures (Poland, Romania, and Portugal)?

What I find even more surprising is that the states that are being pressured to take the bailouts are in the fiscal pinch they are BECAUSE they employed liberal, centralized tax-and-spend policies long before the EU thought it was a good idea... and damn near went broke because of it. Ireland, Spain and Greece all have massive and unsustainable national debts precisely because they allowed this agenda of massive centralized economic planning to overtake economic engines that were working just FINE only a decade earlier.

No better example exists than Ireland. When the "Celtic Tiger" first emerged in the 90s, the corporate tax rate was between 6% and 10%... and investment in infrastructure improvements was a priority across the nation. The resulting boom brought a degree of prosperity to the nation that was unrivaled in Irish history for the better part of the last 2000 years. However, the liberal, nearly socialist agenda of the far left took control of the legislature in 2005 and the next 5 years have seen a collapse of the boom, bringing unemployment in Ireland to more than 14% and the allowing the GDP to contract by nearly 15%... based on nothing more than EU concerns about the "inequality" of wealth distribution within the Republic. Seriously? Because more people got rich than got poor, it was determined that a more centralized means of distributing wealth was needed, which then killed the entire effort all together? Ireland went from a state with a percentage of national debt to GDP of more than 90% in 1983 to a nation where that ratio was less than 30% in less than 25 years... and it WASN'T WORKING? Even the poorest of the poor in Ireland could only hope to find a better life here in America... Ireland's standard of living was second ONLY to the US for people living in the established "poverty level income" range, but that wasn't good enough for the EU. Higher taxes, greater welfare spending, less focus on infrastructure and expansion and more money going to keeping those NOT working living a lifestyle like those that WERE working. That was the plan from Brussels... and look were Ireland is now... just about as broke as Greece, and facing the real prospect of loosing more of its independence and sovereignty to the mighty and all-knowing EU bean counters.

Can someone please tell me... again... what the incentive is to stay within the confines of the EU?