New legislation responding to old EU crisis

From BBC Business News on the status of Spain and a potential bail-out:

On Wednesday, the European Commission unveiled proposals designed to stop taxpayers' money being used to bail out failed banks.
The aim is to ensure losses are borne by bank shareholders and creditors and minimise costs for taxpayers.
However, new legislation is unlikely to come into force before 2014 at the earliest, too late to protect taxpayers from any further immediate bank failures.
"The proposal we have today may be only useful for the future but it does not solve the current problems we face," said Sharon Bowles, chair of the European Parliament's economic and finance committee.
There would be new requirements for countries to prepare for a bank collapse, collecting money through an annual levy on banks that would be used to provide emergency loans or guarantees.

Brilliant. The European Commission will have new laws on the books to prevent a redux of the EU crisis occurring again in the future... if the EU even still exists in the future.

It seems European politicians are acting as if their policies could apply retroactively, but even if these sort of reforms could have stopped the current crisis, that's no guarantee that future crises will look anything like the current one.

There's also the chance that this new legislation - "an annual levy on banks that would be used to provide emergency loans or guarantees" - will just add to the moral hazard problem and make excessive risk-taking by banks even more likely.

Responding to the last crisis is of great temptation to politicians, who must be "doing something" in order to satisfy their constituents, but this foolhardy rush to action may do more damage than good. Post-Enron accounting reforms have been blamed for making the U.S. financial crisis worse, and Europe could be reading a parallel story five years from now if these proposals go through.

The 'Landes Law' on imperialism and its domestic corollary.

Historian David S. Landes

In his New York Times bestseller The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor, David Landes claims

"a law of social and political relationships, namely, that three factors cannot coexist: (1) a marked disparity of power; (2) private access to the instruments of power; and (3) equality of groups or nations." [63]

Penned in 1998, this writing still sheds some interesting light on our recent foreign policy adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Conspiracy theories and "blood for oil" slogans aside, private companies did have a large involvement in immediate invasions as well the as follow-up occupations. Along with industry lobbying and corporate connections in the White House, condition (2) seems to have been justified. The marked disparity of power and inequality between groups hardly even need discussion.


On face, the principle at work here seems accurate. As Landes argues, "Where one group is strong enough to push another around and stands to gain by it, it will do so." However, this incentive isn't limited to foreign policy. I'll propose the following corollary to Landes Law:

Welfare State Corollary: three factors cannot coexist: (1) a marked disparity of specialized interests; (2) private access to the instruments of government; and (3) national government running a balanced budget.

In other words, when an interest group (e.g. farmers, doctors, bus-drivers, etc.) has enough political influence, it will push others around through the legislative process, as long as it stands to gain by doing so. When a multitude of such interests exist, satisfying all their demands will flout any efforts at a balanced budget (unless taxes are incredibly high, and there's an interest group against that too).

While Landes' Law poses a serious challenge to efforts at global peace, the Welfare State Corollary has implications on our current political system's ability to respond to the current financial crisis. I'll leave it to the reader to decide on the accuracy of this analogy.