European Unit of Account

While centralization is not necessarily always correlated to negative ramifications, more often than not it is. Centralizing the chain of command to a general in a legitimate war is both efficient and effective, and probably wise. Centralizing the the control of production of farms can - and has - lead to starvation. When it’s the “people’s farm” and not your farm, no one is ever to blame if a crop doesn’t produce due to lack of care. No one is equally to blame if that same no one takes too much of the produce that season. When discussing complex matters like national and international banking systems, it is to be acknowledged that the task of assigning proper verdict to the social and moral implications of centralization are a bit trickier…but only a bit! A king with absolute authority to lop off anyone’s head he chooses without question could be a path to relatively swift justice and peace; but typically it leads to tyranny, as I have been realizably informed that it is a very rare breed of man indeed that will not let this sort of power go to his head….resulting in others’ heads rolling. Nevertheless, the European Unit of Account, a sort of precursor to the modern Euro, was a somewhat effective international centralization of many European countries’ currency into a singular monetary unit, with the proposed and perceived goal to more thoroughly integrate the continent named after the eastern wind. It would seem that that a currency of national transactional capacity would be sufficient for most, but there are those who wish to further regulate international trade by being able to funnel all regulatory legislation for multiple countries to a very small, select group of people. Again, concentrated power usually doesn’t work out in favor of the ones not in the sphere of that concentration. The American founding fathers, rebels that they were, knew this full well and sought to distribute power, albeit not necessarily wealth (as this often requires a centralizing of power to go against the natural outworking of varied passions and ambitions). But centralizing wealth and power in the form of a seemingly benign committee of benevolent international delegates - well, what could go wrong here? Unfortunately, a lot. For one, the committee gets to arbitrarily set the value of its currency; second, they have the power to unnaturally inflate its worth but flooding the market with new currency to correct for what they perceive as an unhealthy distribution in market flow; third, because of the international nature of the beast, it becomes more difficult to make truly needed amendments to its functioning and the many-headed hydra can continue to expand its territory unrelentingly. The most nefarious aspect, however, is that this form of centralizing comes under guise of uniting sovereign nations under the banner of an equal and free trade economy, but in fact it can have the unintended but very real effect of pitting countries against one another in other arenas such as energy production, conservation, supply chain production, etc. since these so-called sovereign nations actually lose a bit of their sovereignty in being able to regulate their own currency and trade accordingly, they feel pressured to reassert their sovereignty in other ways to offset the balance, and the medicine can end up being worse than the disease.