Yet Europe's politicians are notably failing to tackle these deep-seated and fundamental problems. Indeed, at the recent European Union summit in Greece, they unanimously agreed to make most of these problems worse by adopting a new Constitution for the European Union that will actually entrench some of the policies causing them.
For instance, the draft constitution will establish a European Bill of Rights. As commentator Iain Murray points out, however, whereas the U.S. Bill of Rights restrains the federal government, its European imitator confers vast and dangerously vague powers on the EU's centralized bureaucracy. It does so by granting what are misleadingly called "positive" rights -- i.e., the right to a job, the right to a "free job placement service" and a whole wish list of labour union demands.
These rights would give the Brussels bureaucracy free license to intervene across the continent to regulate and re-regulate its already sclerotic labour market. One leading German politician lamented that if the constitution were adopted, it would make permanent the very regulations that are slowing down the German economy -- and which even Germany's socialist chancellor is now seeking to amend or repeal.
