Why the Euro will ultimately fail

Also, there's more to productivity than salary levels. You also need to factor in education, experience, access to capital (for tools and machines), infrastructure, proximity with suppliers ot clients, administrative overhead, etc. At least part of that will need to get funding (ideally by the EU).

The article suggests the problem is systemic. Even if Greece goes bankrupt but stays in the Euro, the core issues have not been solved and the situation will arise again. In a race between efficiency and diversity, the Euro is systematically predisposed towards efficiency (which reduces the scope for diversity), and the economic controls that have historically protected diversity have been removed, therefore either diversity is lost (member nations lose control of their fiscal policy) or the Euro is abandoned.

That is what the article suggests. What is your response to that?

"...by accepting the euro, your government accepted a loss of sovereignty. You cannot be a sovereign state if you don’t have your own money. If you don’t have your own money, you can’t finance your own government. So this is all the trouble that we see in Greece, in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy. These are governments that are not sovereign, because they don’t have their own money and therefore they cannot finance themselves, they have to rely on foreign private banks to finance them and their creditors are more powerful than the governments and so when the countries have difficulty paying, the creditors may impose austerity on them and loot the countries; Greece is being looted. How do you loot a country? You tell them their pensions have to be cut, their employment has to be cut, social services have to be cut, so that there’s money to pay the banks...."

> Because the Spanish workers aren’t as good as the German at optimising chair-making

> This is not necessarily because the spanish workers are lazy

Oh, thanks, thanks. You are so kind... Except that the spanish workers are not lazy at all (you can find some lazy workers here, and in Germany of course) this is what the troika and little friends want you to think for fun and scamfit. They had called us even the PIGS countries... Portugal Greece, Spain, Italy... ready for sacrifice, "they merit this, they are lazy, stupid, living la vida loca with our money"...

> There’s just one problem. Those damned voters

Yeah, the bastards that we had looted are soo unpredictable that now they don't want to vote us again... this is what they call it democracy I think, stupid democracy...

This article is just propaganda repeating the same dated ideas. Spanish workers can buy the machines they need and the materials they need. We don't live in the XIII siecle. And just for the record, spreading the picture of a spanish (or greek) carpenter sitting under a fig tree working exclusively on "olive wood" is so silly that can not be casual.