The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

Giving birth is supposed to hurt, and with nations it is no different. The labor pains of a nation's birth do not end, however, with the toppling of the dictator, the expulsion of the invaders/conquerors, or the signature of an armistice treaty. The next step in a nation's life is the most crucial one: The Foundation of the State. Europe is currently in the labor pains stage. Its current travails show a marked parallel with the origins of the United States as a Nation : Jefferson (read Merkel) did not want the U.S. to assume the debts of some profligate former colonies (read Greece/Ireland/Portugal/Spain/Italy) and issue U.S. Federal Bonds (read Pan-European Bonds). Hamilton (read Barroso, and to some degree Sarkozy) pushed for the single issue and fiscal integration. The result: Jefferson ceded and the U.S. assumed the debts of less frugal states in exchange for picking a location for the new nation's capital near his home state of Virginia. Integration triumphed. The baby...

Humans are unpredictably predictable. When circumstances surrounding us are overwhelming and pressing, we try to change them. Sometimes aggressively (with revolutions) some other times more passively (quitting your job). Interestingly, this also applies to love life: after a long run of dating people with characteristic "X", the next person you look for is someone with the opposite characteristic, because you now know the disadvantages of that personal trait. The pendulum metaphor is at work. In societies, the metaphor applies to politics, and of course also to matters of economic policy. Totalitarian societies (like Pinochet's Chile or Franco's Spain) topple regimes looking for the longed freedom they did not have before. Societies that reach economic freedom (the U.S.A.) realize that opening their borders to trade allows other nations to get in and "steal" profits from domestic businesses via price undercutting and fierce competition and look to revert th...