Samuel Gregg: Wilhelm Röpke ... The Prophet of Europe's Crisis
Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute. He has authored several books including On Ordered Liberty, his prize-winning The Commercial Society, Wilhelm Röpke's Political Economy, and his 2012 forthcoming Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and America's Future.
As Europe's economic debacle gathers apace, there's no shortage of commentators saying "I told you so." The impact of factors such as out-of-control welfare states, excessive debt, widespread bureaucratization, a flawed monetary experiment, low-productivity, and labor market rigidities seems obvious to us today.
The truth, however, is that few observers -- European or American -- forecast that the European unification project would eventually produce a fiasco on this scale. Indeed, most early opponents of European political and economic integration were old-fashioned lefties who feared it might impede implementation of socialist policies!
A rare exception to this rule was the German economist Wilhelm Röpke. Today, he's mainly known as a primary intellectual architect of the postwar German economic miracle as well as one of postwar Keynesianism's most ferocious critics. However, not many know that Röpke was also one of the very few free market economists who loudly and publicly criticized what would eventually become today's European Union even before the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957. Röpke was in short a "euroskeptic" long before the term was coined...