If your recall fails, remember that we like to forget the inconvenient. Therefore, as a punishment, play through this with me.
 

An unexpected problem arises. This is to be anticipated as, while problems are normal, most problems that come up are unexpected – to those designated to deal with such cases. The response: set up a group of experts to investigate. These will be unblemished folks who had no clue of what is about to happen. Eloquent surprise is what conveys expert status. Their qualification is a derivate of the “shock” caused by the facts. Upset, they will blame anything but the policy makers who control their appointment. “No wonder,” the nasty ones will say: they were advising the politicians that were caught with their pants down. You have already guessed the next stage. Setting up a special organization will be recommended. (It does not help with the problem but it lucratively saves kin and insiders from unemployment.)

The resulting organization was to overcome a problem. A dash of realism tells that if the crisis is gone the organization will expire. Which means that functionaries will be without a function. Translation: not good. So the motivation is not to solve the problem the bureau is to overcome, but to “administer” it. By this stage the officials and their beneficiaries have identical interests. People “in the field” are recipients of an agency that also feeds its staff. Clearly, such interests do not desire a solution but hope for the perpetuation of the profitable problem. Overcoming it would hurt scores. So, the problem becomes chronic. Now you know why poverty keeps its administrators endowed. Also why, if there is more poverty – or whatever its proof for the bureaucracy running it might be – many can live off its returns.

With the basics established we can hip or hop over to the topic of Eurocracy.

Fifty years ago the foundations of a united Europe were laid. The expectation was that “Europe” would facilitate cross-border transactions while reducing the friction hindering economic activity -and therefore public welfare. Less state, more freedom, security and peace! Largely, the expectations regarding quantitative enlargement were realized. At the same time, however, a system conceived to simplify interaction across boundaries developed its own “apparat”. It is dedicated to solving problems whose existence guarantees the survival of the bureaucratic mechanism brought about to cut red tape.

The upshot negates the expectation regarding simpler ways to transact business across boundaries. To accomplish simplification, a new organization, mirroring the centralized national governments of old, was set up to run “Europe”. Eurocracy was born and it expands while administering (bureaucratic) “unity”.

What spoke originally for the EU was the security of its components – small states endangered by great powers. It was also assumed that Europe would enhance their ability to interact frequently, fast, and unhindered. This was to add up to more freedom for more autonomous persons, that is to liberty irrespective of the state.

Institutionalized interests, such as bureaucracies set up to provide something society, allegedly, if left alone, is incapable to deliver, will understandably distrust spontaneity. Lack of consciousness or false consciousness by the “administered” is viewed as something that can be replaced by the staff running institutions created to correct the failures of public opinion, awareness – or those of the market.

Institutions need money to run what might work without them. The funds come from taxes. Society, especially its most deserving members, might have an interest in lower taxes and in a higher discretionary income representing the rewards for an above average performance. The returns go where the reward is greatest, that is to where the gain, reflecting societal needs, is felt to be the highest. According to this, profit is high where the demand is elevated. However, the need of institutions living not off profits earned in the market but off tax revenues is of a different quality. Their sustenance flows from the taxation of gains (rewards) that are discovered. If these entrepreneurial profits express a skilled response – in timing and quality- to demand, then taxes that grow disproportionately while such rewards increase, counter-act the process that rewards skill, savvy and the willingness to assume risks. Since the writer thinks that taxes pay for what makes civilization possible, this is not meant as a general attack on all taxes financing for “public goods“. The target here is the tendency to tax and to spend for purposes that serve special interests which do not reflect the goals of those who pay.

The Europe run out of Brussels is not a state. It is not, a community based on language, common history and background. (What Europe has in some form, is a cerebrally conceived necessity which is abstractly shared by the “Euromerican” writer.) Nor is there a European society. This has consequences.

Where there is a society there is likely to be a collective will to belong. The ensuing state and its institutions will reflect this. Sensed kinship will also create an inclination to cooperate within the community. Where there is no discernment of a community expressing the individual on a higher level, the inclination to cooperate will diminish. Thus a need to substitute the missing “inclination“ by “regulation” emerges.

Europe (and its currency) does not express either a society nor a state. These sentiments would allow it to benefit from a loyalty flowing from a sense of belonging. It is the administrative structure set up to substitute for the natural affiliation of subjects that attempts to replace what makes states strong. Europe as a community exists only among a fraction of her political class. A consequence: the apparatus feels it benefits from the expansion of the Europe it runs.

Here you have the reason why, new members were admitted that lacked in economic-political terms – such as the non-mistreatment of minorities – the qualifications of membership in a modern federation. The need to replace the missing consciousness-driven identity is what explains the Community’s more than 700-thousand pages-long charter. Again: what spontaneity does not deliver must be replaced by regulations.

Laws, regulations, running things that should operate if left alone: it all takes money. “Money” harks back to governments’ resource, which is taxes. To the extent that Europe, in its current form, is an artificial construct, the EU is in need of much money to replace whatever is “missing”. The sum corresponds to the needs of an inflated administration to run whatever could be furnished by naturally developed organisms.

Once the, by definition exaggerated, taxes are to be collected, a discrepancy between the perceived benefits and the payer’s discernment of a fair return surfaces. Its natural consequence is a desire to avoid payments felt to exceed benefits and to under-perform the criteria of a fair deal. The fact is that the EU derives benefits from the tax-systems of its states and is therefore inclined to protect the members’ right to tax. On this level, the benefits of the economy of scale did not materialize for her tax-subjects because it is the high-tax states that set the Union’s tone. Instead of striving for higher efficiency at a lower cost, the EU has committed itself to the protection of inefficiency – for a share of the loot.

Switzerland – a non-member in the middle of the EU – is the major and close-bye loophole, through which those living in high-tax systems can escape. Regardless of the little that is likely to be mainly wrong that you might know about her, Switzerland is a small country with a major economy. The discrepancy is due to political stability, good management and high efficiency. Taxes are on the federal, canton/state and community level low and thus reflect business-like operating costs. Since every entity manages for itself, the tax levied in different localities diverges as widely within the country as the whole departs from the Continental norm. Swiss taxes are low and reflect the costs generated by residents. Being in the center of Europe with the languages of its major neighbors used by natives (German, French and Italian) the country is a natural magnet for those fleeing the tax-man that makes them feel plucked as though they would be chicken packaged for KFC.

It is in response to this unpleasant example that “Europe” is reacting. Encircled non-member Switzerland is under increasing pressure to help to enforce the EU’s tax policies. At the moment the demand is that the individual citizens and the legal entities of EU countries not be extended the (considerable) tax advantages Switzerland provides to resident persons and firms. To buy good will, Switzerland is already paying a billion to (absurdly) support the costs of integrating new and economically unripe EU members. While she helps to finance the EU’s forced expansion, increasingly low Swiss taxes are a bother to the continental system that surrounds this ancient federal republic. In this the EU acts in cahoots with the Swiss Left and its Green subdivision.

The local collectivists are committed to a social policy that supports projects that create dependent classes. High taxes are a consequence of hand-outs. This spending is, therefore, not an interest of the Left that chases voters. Higher taxes meaning more dole to wooed political clients, the EU’s push for higher taxes – in the interest of meeting European standards – is welcome. What local influence translated into mandates might not be able to accomplish could be achieved through pressure from abroad. The alliance, based on the common interests with the EU, the indigenous Left and the welfare-class, is as clear as it is strong.

At this time official Switzerland, even the leftist foreign Minister within her collective leadership, resist the (upwards) adjustment of Swiss taxes to EU norms. Momentarily the bone of contention is the treatment of EU-persons and firms that take residence in Switzerland. Oddly enough the EU’s demands are justified by a 1972 agreement regarding free trade. (Naturally free trade has little to do with local – canton and community – taxes.)

It does not take an oracle to make a prediction. If, ultimately, Switzerland agrees to tax resident ex-EU entities as though they would continue to be in the EU and not subject to local regulations, a follow-up issue will arise. The new demand will be for Switzerland to change its tax system and reallocate her public funds. Some of he latter implies co-financing the EU from the outside. The justification will bear the buzz-terms “solidarity” and the “homogenization“ of tax policy. (These are codes for contributing to projects that one does not feel obligated to support.) While money will be extorted for leaving the Swiss alone, a change in the levy of local taxes will be demanded. Low taxes are a bad example to those aware of them. Before the idea of low cost governance could catch on, the weed must be eradicated.

The upshot will be an adjustment that will lift the tax sovereignty of the 26 Cantons and of their self-administering communities that levy about 80% of what residents here must pay. (By the way, for the benefit of those whose little knowledge is mainly wrong: Swiss lunches are not for free. The tax burden equals that of the US, Ireland and Japan.) Centralization will create “order”. It will also stop rewarding efficient and independent local government and overcome within Switzerland the discrepancy between low and high taxing (competently and ineptly managed) entities. Taxes will rise, aggregate revenues will drop, unity will gloriously prevail and the bad example of functioning de-centralization will be eliminated. Meanwhile the obnoxious Swiss will become poorer. All of these gains of Eurocracy will mean that the enterprising talents will have to either swim or walk to some island of sanity or to Singapore.