Thread: What UN will do? if

Why did they make that change? Not meaning to stray too far OT, just a little curious.

What the politicians tell us about it:
The euro would make the EU economic and monetary union. It would also result to a more political union and more economic cohesion between the EU countries. This and more consequences of getting the euro would improve the economic development of the EU.

How the people experience it:
A nice thing of it is that you don't have to have lots of different kinds of money when travelling through Europe. But a real bad thing is that live got much more expensive.

So basically they made it so that europe is united as one unit, rather than many different ones? That makes sense on a few levels, how did they determine the units value (assuming that each currency before held a different value then another)?

Yes, a part of Europe is united as one unit. Before the euro, the countries taking part had their own valuta with their own values which differed a lot. But I don't know how they calculated the value of the euro.

I must say I don't think the EU will work. Or at least it might work for some but not others and I think that Britain will be one of those 'others'. The currency has not performed well and I have read that many Germans are wishing they never changed. Some might say it's teething problems but I simply don't see that you can take a whole set of different nationalities, cultures, work ethics, political persuasions etc etc. and mesh them all into one unit.

Seems hard to understand how the Euro could work, given different economies a/o currencies, but I'm not in Europe and every economic textbook I've read starts out w/a phrase like "All things being equal (but they never are)", essentially doing a CYA for why the theories don't work in real life.
[Oversimplification] The problem w/capitalism is that it's a way for a few to get rich. The problem w/communism is that it's a way for everyone else to get poor. [/Oversimplification]

P.S. - no point in you right wing zealots flaming this post (don't expect any left wing zealots to reply, but the same goes for you ) because there won't be a response. Your views are known ad nauseaum.

Originally posted by salvelinus
Seems hard to understand how the Euro could work, given different economies a/o currencies, ...

We had executed a big project in UK for Euro conversion. My company earned millions out of it. (Yeah! I'm still a pauper) ... the biggest problem we had was with the 'lira'. They don't have a denomination less than the lira ! So fractions always were a big headache to us.

>..and I have read that many Germans are wishing they never changed.

The main reason of people, not only in Germany, wishing they never changed is that live got a lot more expensive.

>but I simply don't see that you can take a whole set of different
>nationalities, cultures, work ethics, political persuasions etc etc.
>and mesh them all into one unit.

I don't think you need to put it all into one unit in which everybody is equal, but I think it is very well possible to work together to reach some goal, whatever your background is.

>The problem w/capitalism is that it's a way for a few to get rich.
>The problem w/communism is that it's a way for everyone else
>to get poor.

In the Netherlands we currently are switching from a neo-liberal government to a more socialistic government. And I am happy with that. The neo-liberal government was quite capitalistic and thought that thing would be better if you just let the market do the things.

So things like public transport and energy supply were put onto the market. This resulted in high prices and low quality. The companies doing public transport or energy supply put a lot of money in competition and to reduce costs they reduced services. For example, to reduce costs some public transport companies removed some bus lines. On the other hand the customer had to pay more.

Also health care was put onto the market and hospitals had to compete. Therefore the hospitals were almost turned into companies with managers leading it. The managers did a lot of things to reduce costs, for example reducing the number of hospitals in a region to save money or to reduce specific health care to save money.

Because prices are increasing and quality is decreasing people now want to turn it back. And hopefully the socialistic government will do that.