Submitted by Thomas Kolbe
How will we deal with private property in Europe in the future?
A highly complex debate follows from this question, one that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen interpreted in her own very particular way on Friday. In a speech to French business leaders at the MEDEF’s La Rencontre des Entrepreneurs de France in Paris, the former defense minister talked about using EU citizens’ bank deposits to get the ailing eurozone, the European economy, back on its feet.
An unmistakable message: In the view of the EU’s chief Eurocrat, private property as a protective wall shielding citizens from an overreaching state has served its purpose as a pillar of civilization.
Central planning, subsidy madness – this is Brussels under the magnifying glass.
Certainly: In the face of towering government debt and capital flight from the old continent, in whose wake thousands of patents and tens of thousands of highly qualified professionals are being swept away, citizens’ wealth is bound to awaken political appetites. A ruthless expropriation or the decreed redirection of cash, as the finest bureaucratic German puts it, is supposed to solve the problems Brussels itself has caused through its stubborn climate policy, its overregulation and its continuing insanity of interventionism.
Von der Leyen was explicit before the business leaders: Europe has savings, she said, but unfortunately those savings are sitting on the sidelines. Ten trillion euros are sitting as cash savings in the hands of private households in bank accounts, lectures von der Leyen in the manner of a classic central planner who can no longer take her eyes off citizens’ wealth. The European economy must now put this capital to work for its companies, the chief bureaucrat decree
