The London “Daily Telegraph” columnist, Ambrose Evan-Pritchard reported in an article on July 7,that the Dutch financial company, ING, has done a study that the possible collapse of the Euro currency would be a catastrophe for the European and world Economies.
In a new piece that I’ve written on “Currency Competition Instead of the Euro Monopoly,” I suggest that the Euro had been a mistake from the beginning, and has been driven more by political goals to create a United States of Europe that would be centrally regulated and controlled from Brussels and highly influenced by the French and the Germans, and has less to do with the economic rationales for a single currency in a single European market.
Instead, drawing upon F. A. Hayek’s case for “Choice in Currency,” I propose that the current fiscal and monetary crisis in Europe should be viewed as an opportunity to reverse course — to do away with the Euro, and return to national currencies in a setting in which the citizens of all the European countries would have the freedom to choose and use which ever currency in which they have the most confidence.
Of course, the final ideal is the “denationalization” of money, and ending all governmental control and central planning of the creation and quantity of money is society. But at least Hayek’s proposal from 1975 decentralizes that unfortunate and misplaced monopoly control, and breaks the hold of total centralized monetary central planning power over the length of the European continent.
