Online today at The American Spectator is an article from Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg. The article highlights the forethought of German economist Wilhelm Röpke, who predicted Europe’s present economic downturn in the middle of the twentieth century. Röpke, Gregg says, was a “euroskeptic” before the term existed. Excerpt here:

Where Röpke proved correct was in envisaging that efforts to impose European political integration from the top-down would go hand-in-hand with attempts to replicate large welfare systems and extensive regulation across Europe. What’s now called “Social Europe,” Röpke maintained, was integral to the same dirigiste and rationalist mindset that viewed extensive planning by political-bureaucratic elites as infinitely superior to the workings of Adam Smith’s invisible hand within a legal framework of clear rules and limited government.

Röpke died in February 1966, decades before the present crisis that’s created a bleak economic future for an entire generation of young Europeans and turned the phrase “Greece” into a byword for dysfunctionality. Like many prophets, Röpke’s predictions about the long-term effects of choices made by European leaders in the 1950s and 1960s were mocked in his own time. But in the unlikely event of Europe’s political masters escaping the echo chamber that tells them that salvation can only be found in ever-greater centralization, those whose knowledge of history extends beyond the last 24 hour news cycle might be honest enough to admit that Röpke was right.

And the PIIGS might fly.

Entire article here.