Uh huh? Keep in mind that, well, to the west and south of those, some people came up with the steam engine, circumnavigated Africa a couple of years before the Portugese eventually did, identified that earth was round, and said pretty much everything that needed to be said about democracy and politics.

But yeah, they're all idiots... Maybe.

Then again... they did in France; and they won. And so will they in Belgium if they got their case and evidence right.

Adding to this, the Commission's members must be approved by the European Parliament.

+1. It is, though note that there's an interesting side effect: minority groups such as ecologists, extreme right- and left-wing groups, and regionalist or independentist groups (e.g. the UKIP and their ever-so-colorful Nigel Farage) have a lot more clout at the EP than they typically do in national parliaments. They're under-represented at the national level; they're over-represented at the EU level. For better or worse, they end up having a say on things that they otherwise wouldn't. In a sort-of weird manner, it's democracy at work.

+1 too. It would arguably be better if, in the future, the EU president were directly elected and presented his EC to the EP for approval. But it's not a given whether such a thing would be accepted anytime soon.

Might you be meaning the notorious micromanager who hid pedophiles under the rug and who is currently pope?

Nope. ALL directives must pass through the EP.

Methinks you've no idea of what you're talking about. Only the most uninformed American, British and Continental European could possibly have anything to say about EU democracy -- and that would be if, and only if, they followed Anglo-Saxon news.

Get real. Seriously.

The parliament is elected in very much the same way as the US congress is. The EC officials are suggested by elected heads of state, and must be approved by the EU parliament.

When new directives and regulations are in the pipe, the entire process is entirely transparent. They publish pretty much everything they do in no less than 23 languages. Consider that for a moment. 23 languages. If you've got anything to say about whatever the EC and the EP are working on, you merely need to read up and participate. And you can. And some do. At all levels. It's grass-root stuff, really. And grass-root movements actually get their way every now and then (e.g. ACTA), contrary to what occurs in the US congress.

The EU's key issue, if any, is this: When local parliaments transcribe a directive into local law that relates to improving air quality, they'll readily take credit for it. But when heads of States agree to pass a tough but much needed reform as an EU treaty, directive or regulation, they'll instantly blame the EU for it.

A case in point would be France's latest president, Hollande. He campaigned saying he'd renegotiate the stability pact. Anyone with an ounce of clue knew that he was full of shit. But even his key opponent, Sarkozy, didn't call him out on it, because the EU is far too convenient a scapegoat to lay bare. Hollande went on to lick Merkel's feet and promptly enact the actual treaty. And he'll need it, to pass further legislation down the road to axe the public sector. Want you to bet that he won't place part or all of the blame on the stability pact when he does?

Its other key issue would be the UK press' Euro-skepticism at large. Which, I assume, is your main source of information -- directly or not.

Wtf are you talking about?!? Leftwing frenchies don't think that way -- the extreme rightwing frenchies do.

That's a fair point, but... how do you reconcile it with requiring that Apps be signed by an Apple-controlled developer key to prohibit malware from tampering with executable code, that Apps be denied to use private APIs that can potentially change without notice, or -- perhaps even more importantly in the future -- that Apps be denied to be bloated with spyware?

FTFY.

France has already convicted several senior officials a few years back for crimes such as embezzlement, and contribution to suicide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_in_France

Because I agree with it. I've absolutely nothing to add to it -- you're entirely correct. Printing money to extend new payments to new interest groups is indeed inflationary. :-)

The part I didn't agree with was your dismissal of "specious arguments about how debt repayment [by minting money] won't be inflationary." The case for it is not at all specious.

By the way, if you take the time to delve into Steve Keen's research and watch a couple of his videos (e.g. the one he did for Google) per my suggestion, he makes the interesting case that one way to squeeze the excess debt out of the system would be to perform a modern variation of a mass-debt cancellation. In essence, literally printing a few trillions, and handing it over to the public directly but with strings attached: the money must be used to pay down debt if you have any. It would deleverage indebted households, recapitalize banks in the process, and if the handout is large enough, the spending by non-leveraged households could very well generate enough activity to revive the economy, helping the latter two groups further.

There's a bit more to programming than bogosorting a string of zeros and ones

Read the post he linked to. The bloggers that run that site hold fairly sane views on a number of topics, so give their arguments a chance instead of dismissing on grounds that they're inconsistent with your worldview.

And, by the way, there's nothing inflationary about the Treasury minting $20 trillion to repay its debt in its entirety and secure cash for its next couple of budgets. I admittedly haven't read the linked post's author's reasoning, which I'd wager offers a few insightful remarks; but I can offer you my own remarks.

Consider, for a moment, the useful clue that central banks (not just Bernanke; also the ECB, etc.) actually have printed a few trillions since 2007, and that the only material price increases we can speak of since then are in commodities and stock markets -- which is to say, wall street is blowing new bubbles with the free cash instead of loaning it. Why? One reason is that financial institutions are just as over leveraged and insolvent today as they were in 2007; in some cases even more so. The liabilities and bad loans were merely swept under the rug, waiting to bite us in the ass even harder when hell breaks loose. Another is that they've essentially nobody to loan money to in this economy, except themselves.

Whichever combination of reasons it actually is, the net effect is that the money isn't finding its way into the consumer's pocket, and the consumer's pocket is where official inflation is being measured. If we factored all asset prices into official inflation, we'd probably have been measuring deflation for the past few years. Instead, we mostly look at household expenses like grocery shopping, where money running around after goods has been more or less the same (you stop paying your mortgage before you stop eating), and we thus observe no material price increases except those related to gasoline prices -- which have a lot to do with peak oil and events in the Persian Gulf, and which weed into grocery prices in the form of truck deliveries.

It's tempting to dismiss the latter observation as specious, on grounds that price increases are a mere consequence of inflation, that inflation itself is an increase in the money supply, i.e. that what we're really seeing here is banks sitting on cash hoards instead of handing it over the the public, and shit will hit the fan the minute banks decide to leak some of it to the public.

And I agree... except for the fact that inflation is not an increase in the supply of money; it is an increase in the supply of money and credit. Fractional reserve banking helping, the key creators of money in our economy are financial institutions; not governments or central banks. (As an aside, delve into Steve Keen's research for sane views on how this actually works.) incidentally, the private sector as a whole is currently deleveraging, destroying credit faster than the Fed is willing to print money, and that is why hyperinflationists have been proven wrong again and again in the past few years.

In that light, I'd opine that minting $20 trillion into the economy would have absolutely zero effect if, at the same time, financial institutions are regulated in such a way that they're forced to deleverage by a similar amount. This could be as simple (and in fact, sane) as requiring banks to maintain reserves at 30% of deposits and denying them to count junk like AAA-rated mortgage backed securities as reserves. (And I'd actually suggest that such a move would force them to deleverage be a shit ton more than whatever the Treasury mints.) Anyway, my $0.02 worth.

Yeah, it would be more fun if they shrunk it further and called it Chucky