That's an Understatement

From an unnamed 'Senior EU bureaucrat, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal's lead editorial today.

"They [The French people] haven't read it. If they had read it, they wouldn't understand it. If they understood it, they wouldn't like it."

This bureaucrat then said the French citizens would then vote to approve the EU Constitution. (They didn't.)

The Constitution is a whopping 485 pages, took two years to produce, and is one of the most puke-inducing documents to ever be penned. While opening up the traditionally collectivist Eurocentric economies, it was also one of the most anti-Semitic and anti-Christian documents ever produced.

I'm personally torn on this defeat of this document. (The French "non" increases chances of the Dutch also saying 'no.' Italy is now thinking it approved it to fast, and the Poles are upset about the way French Socialists used imagery of a Polish plumber to urge defeat.) While the one thing that Europeans need to get their economy out of the doldrums is free-market reforms - something the EU Constitution was going to give them - it should not have been done in the manner that it was going to be: Forced on them like a child and his couch syrup.

So the European social welfare state lives on; for now.

Someday it will have to end, or it will only continue Europe down the road to 3rd tier economic status they seem destined to be on.

When the EU Constitution dies the well-deserved death it deserves and the next Constitutional Convention is called, some pointers:

1. Keep it simple (and short)
2. Don't force it on them - if French socialists want the thing to die - so be it.
3. Listen to the people - it's easier then it sounds

Perhaps, then it will be something worthy of the birthplace of the classical liberal enlightenment.