Hitchens versus Hitchens on Keynes and Currency Sovereignty

That is, Christopher Hitchens versus Peter Hitchens.



Christopher Hitchens never knew that much about economics, apart from a shallow Marxist perspective, and he shows this ignorance here very well. He asked whether Ireland lost its economic independence by adopting the Euro – only a few short years before Ireland’s membership of the Eurozone utterly destroyed that country’s economic sovereignty in the aftermath of the global recession of 2008–2009, which for Ireland turned into a full-blown and horrific depression.

Curiously, it is the idiosyncratic Peter Hitchens, citing Keynes, who gets it right: without currency sovereignty you have lost a fundamental foundation of economic independence. This is the major problem with the Eurozone today. The democracy of Greece, for example, has just this year been shown to be virtually worthless while Greece remains within the Eurozone.

I not quite sure where and when Keynes said the remark attributed to him (that is, “whoever controls the currency controls the government”). Maybe it is apocryphal, but it is consistent with his views.