Despite the occasionally splenetic nature of this blog, it's actually quite rare that I feel like shouting at the radio or hurling a shoe at the TV. Such a moment did however occur on Newsnight a couple of days ago, when Kirsty Wark was interviewing a German financier.
What advice, Ms Wark wanted to know, would the financier give to the 68% - pause and gasp - of young Greek people currently without work. "Well obviously", replied the financier, in a nostrum worthy of Ayn Rand, "they should go to countries like Germany to look for work".
Pause and gasp.
This is the remorseless logic of the Eurozone in a nutshell. It is a single market, a single currency, moving towards a single economic policy. In that singularity labour, like capital, is a commodity to be shunted around, from areas where there are no jobs to areas - often hundreds or thousands of miles away - where work is to be had. It is Norman Tebbit's "On your bike" writ large. "On your plane", perhaps, or more likely, the hapless protagonists being so strapped for cash, "On your overnight bus".
But that's not what citizens want, I felt like shouting. Young Greeks don't want to go to Germany to find work! They want to find work in a country where they can speak their own language, eat their own food, socialise with their own friends, enjoy their own culture and stay in touch with their own families! But this is a luxury which the Eurozone thinks they should give up.
Fundamentally, in its disdain for the nation state, the Eurozone treats individuals as pawns who must be willing to up sticks as economic circumstances dictate and roam Europe looking for countries where the vagaries of the markets have determined that times are less mean.
Far from being the apotheosis of citizen-centred government, the single currency area has ensured that in future many people will be treated as mere units of production, rootless and voiceless. It's hard to think of a more naked expression of capitalism's unacceptable face.
This is what we are learning about the EU in general, and the Eurozone in particular. As nation states give more and more power to the centre, they find themselves - how did we miss this? - increasingly powerless over areas of their politics that truly matter. In the UK our biggest bugbear is perhaps immigration, which we no longer control; but other countries have also given away economic policy, which they find is now being dictated to them by Brussels. Thus is power centralised and thus are national electorates disenfranchised.
The banker was absolutely right. Young Greeks should go to Germany. That is what life in the Eurozone entails.
