THE EMERALD ISLE IN A SOCIALIST SEA
By David Keane
"THE HILL"
March 7, 2001

Conservatives have for years been warning us of the dangers of ceding sovereignty to international organizations such as the United Nations and, more recently, the World Trade Organization.

Their fears have been routinely dismissed by the more sophisticated as either paranoid or grossly exaggerated. Indeed, anyone with the temerity to even raise such questions as we rush headlong into an era of economic and political globalization is these days routinely dismissed as a bit wacky.

But a realistic look at what's going on in the world forces one to conclude that they may have a point. The fact is that the nation state is under attack in minor and major ways from those who seek regional or even global governmental arrangements that the citizens of many nations quite reasonably find completely unacceptable.

Take the case of Ireland. The place was, until recently, an economic basket case and had been one since the days of the potato famine. It produced good songs, Maureen O'Hara and little else until its political leaders (unlike most Irish-American politicians) decided that Reaganomics might actually work to stimulate their economy as it did ours.

A wave of tax cuts and regulation slashing has made Ireland an attractive place to do business. Within less than a decade her people were working and prospering .

The turnaround has been so dramatic that the former economic backwater that is Ireland is today known as the "Celtic Tiger," with an annual economic growth rate in recent years that has exceeded 8 percent.

Needless to say, this performance has not escaped notice either in Brussels, the capital of the newly emerging European central government.

Now, one might expect the economists and politicians who run these vanishing nations to rejoice at Ireland's success and even emulate Dublin's actions. Well, they aren't. They're mad as hell and have vowed not to put up with this irresponsible upstart.

You see, Ireland is emerging as an island of economic freedom and opportunity in their midst. And, truth to tell, that is simply unacceptable to other European Union (EU) members. The European community, as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned years ago, was designed to be a community of socialist or quasi-socialist economies bound together by compatible internal interests and a desire to deal with the rest of the world as a bloc.

Her fear was that a socialist Europe would also be a protectionist Europe because global free trade would reward nations that adopted policies that would empower entrepreneurs within to compete with others. That meant that socialist and high-tax states would suffer in an arena that rewards efficiency. To her mind, the EU would grow into a group of socialist states bound together by the need to protect themselves from the forces of economic freedom that have transformed the rest of the world.

It turns out, of course, that she was right, but that Ireland wants to be part of the new world rather than the old. This simply won't do. The old Ireland fit, but the new Ireland does not and must therefore be brought to heel. To do this, other EU members are suggesting that her policies be condemned as unfair to higher-taxed members of the community because they give her a competitive advantage that is just not fair. Their solution is to coax or drag her away from such policies.

Oh, they're arguing that whatever punishment they ultimately mete out will be for Ireland's own good as well as theirs. Until recently, for example, they've been suggesting that any additional tax cuts will simply overheat the Irish economy and lead to inflation that will threaten the island's newfound prosperity.

There are two problems with this reasoning. The first is that inflation seems to be slacking off in Ireland at present even as the economy continues to grow, and the second, as many Irishmen and women are beginning to suggest, is that it's none of their business.

After all, if the elected representatives of a supposedly free people cannot decide for themselves whether they want to raise or lower taxes are the people they represent truly free? The answer, of course, is that they are not.

The Irish are discovering this today. As other nations, including our own, contemplate ceding more and more power and, yes, sovereignty to international bodies, it is something we will find ourselves discovering tomorrow.

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