> > Instead of combining some national distinctions, why not just destroy
> > them all? You want East Asia to be more like the EU
>
> Nothing of the sort. I would like East Asia to be its own charmingly
> autonomous geopolitical self.
In other words, East Asia should become yet another capitalist neo-empire, its "autonomy" and "selfhood" presumably -- since this is what all economic powers/blocs do --- based on protectionism, i.e. accumulation through subsidies (extracted from labour by means of taxes) and tariff barriers (with the accompanying higher retail prices).
And I've said this before, but it's worth saying again: anyone who thinks a world dominated by several economic powers, instead of one, is a recipe for human progress, should go and examine world history from 1870 to 1914; that will be our precursor.
> The ECB's rates are 2% -- pretty close to inflation. Liquidity growth in
> the EU has been snappy, close to 7-8% per annum. And the EU governments
> have been running hefty deficits. That doesn't look like hypermonetarism
> to me.
>
> > By positing Asia and Europe as
> > counterweights to the US, aren't you revealing that your objections
> > to American capitalism are purely aesthetic?
>
> What's aesthetic about the 2.5 trillion EUR the US owes to the new
> metropoles, or the 35% the euro has appreciated vis-a-vis the dollar?
There are obviously some windfall gains in accumulation and the standard of living, from taking a lot of tired old imperial economies (and their fragments) and re-merging them; before too long, however, the limits of the economies of scale (granted by federalism) will be reached and the accumulation of the eurobourgeoisie will once again face the well-developed class consciousness of the europroletariat. To cite a few examples: no countries have higher rates of union membership and strikes than Denmark and Finland, the militancy of French unions is well-known, many east Europeans lament their lost social standards of living, and so on. These will be real obstacles to enhanced accumulation in the near future, and will only be resolved by further expansion of the EU (something which appears to have finite cultural barriers) and/or war (whether between classes or empires).
Grant.