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Remember when Aral and Cordelia drank champagne for dinner every night for a week? That's a real test of your sci-fi geekiness since it was a story we only heard secondhand from Miles in A Civil Campaign.
In fact, thanks to the magic of Google, here's the quote from the Barrayar history page:
Among our father's early reforms, when he was Regent, was that he managed to impose uniform simplified rules for ordinary subjects who wanted to change Districts, and switch their oaths to their new District Count... Effectively, the new law gave every Imperial subject the right to vote local governement with their feet. Our parents drank champagne with dinner the night the vote slipped through, and Mother grinned for days. I must have been about six, because we were living here by then, I remember.I didn't quite get the reference right off the top of my head, but close.
There is actually a point to quoting a completely fictional tale. Ok, other than the fact that I adore Lois McMaster Bujold's books and if you haven't read them you should run right out and get one. Now.
The point is that particular line has stuck in my mind for a long time (and clearly other people's too given that it was quoted online where I could easily find it) because there is a lot of truth to it, particularly the importance of human mobility as part of an economic and political system. I was reminded of this reading an interview with Austan Goolsbee "on why the euro zone won't survive."
He raises several concerns, but a big one is the lack of mobility. This is one significant thing that distinguishes the Euro economic union from the United States economic union. In the US we can pick up and move from one state or one coast to another. There are certainly barriers like geography and distance from family, but you know that wherever you go you will speak the language and automatically have residency and voting rights. Assuming of course that you're a citizen. Non-citizens may have bigger hurdles. Of course that's the point. In Europe if you move 1000 kilometers you won't be a citizen anymore. Here I moved more than 3000 km and that wasn't an issue.
Goolsbee argues that we are a workable currency area because people can move around. (And because there are a lot of automatic subsidies like Medicaid and Social Security that transfer resources from rich areas to poor ones.) There are a lot of reasons for Euromess but this is a fundamental structural one. And things haven't changed. This original article was from November of last year.
