The Implications of the English Channel

Via Cranmer, we learn that more European left-wingers have been jumping on the "financial crisis as a failure of free markets" bandwagon. The vice-president of the European Commission was the first one of any standing to giddily hop aboard. The Federal Chancellor of Austria, Alfred Gusenbauer, albeit late by Gordon Brown's standards, has cheerfully followed on:

... the market economy can function only if the state does intervene. The US financial crisis demonstrates what happens when markets are given free rein. Rather than regulate themselves, market players destroy themselves, however much they might be marveled at as golden calves.

As is the case with both Brown and, it seems, everybody else, Gusenbauer is either chosing to ignore the facts, or is just ignorant. The financial markets have never been free. As has been discussed here and is much, much more detail on better blogs, the crisis is a consequence of poor (notice, not a lack of) regulation and ill-advised state interference in the case of sub-prime mortgages. That's not political opinion, that is fact.

That Gusenbauer later in the article also calls for a huge expansion of European nations' welfare systems gives his agenda away, but much earlier on, he raises another very crucial point:

Europe's social-market economies, far more than the Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal model, regard mitigating the inequalities created by markets as the state's duty.

Ignoring the fact that his entire argument is based on a myth, here we have another Continental politician recognising that an appreciation of free markets is an Anglo-Saxon trait. We have another Continental politician, who like Charles de Gaulle and many others before him, understands that Britain is, and always has been, 'separate' from Europe. Kings of England were asserting long before Henry VIII that England was an imperium, completely apart from the imperium "over there" on the Continent. The financial crisis is a consequence of the spread of the European tendency towards what Dr Richard North has dubbed a culture of regulation founded upon "rule-based philosophy":

That is absolutely the core, the quintessence of the problem. We need a massive cultural shift – in fact, a reversal to where we came from, back to the culture which made us Anglo Saxons so successful. While the euro-weenies were a bickering bunch of statelets too busy squabbling and fighting each other to achieve anything, we were conquering the world.

Put it this way: with Anglo-Saxon "results-based philosophy" regulation, no British bank crashed in 200 years. Since the EU started making our financial regulation for us, well, we haven't had to wait too long. When it comes to Europe getting involved in our affairs, it seems, as Tony Soprano would put it, to have the Midas touch in reverse - everything it touches "turns to shit".

The implications of the English Channel are far greater than geography alone.