posted on Mar, 5 2005 @ 06:48 PM
The EU is an interesting experiment. Looking at it objectively, it has more people than the US, but even with the latest enlargement it does not have
the economic or industrial output of the US. The US experiment is also going to show interesting results within the next 10-20 years. India, China,
for some reason I don't fear them overtaking the US (or EU) in my lifetime (and I pray I've got 60-80 years left in me, more depending on tech
advances, heh) simply because they rely so much on other nations. EU will no doubt become a "power", but as that Rasputin says France and Germany
have violated the EU charter for years with impunity (debt to GDP, tragic unemployment.) I don't want to espose any ideology, but socialism in the
long run is a bad idea because it lowers incentives (communism nearly completely eliminate incentives - remember that old nail analogy - Soviet
workers being graded on how many nails they made, so they made huge amounts of small nails... then they decided they'd grade the nail production on
weight, so they made few HUGE nails... you know where I'm going with this)
err, anecdote rather, not analogy
[edit on 5-3-2005 by AlphaHumana]