Europe's single currency is a bust. With unemployment reaching depression levels in the Mediterranean states, time has long passed to negotiate an orderly return to national currencies.

Euro advocates argue a single currency is essential for creating a unified continental economy, and the euro is falling short of expectations, because monetary union was initiated without fiscal union-namely, sovereign taxing and spending authority for Brussels. Those arguments are little more than polemics from politicians, public servants and pundits who have staked their reputations and careers on a failed economic idea.

Prior to the euro, Europe already enjoyed tariff free trade, common product standards, and reasonably free migration of labor and capital. By Treaty of Rome, Brussels has constitutional primacy in antitrust enforcement, called competition policy across the pond. That permits the EU bureaucracy