The European Problems As Seen from Prague - Vaclav Klaus

[...] There are undisputable economic costs connected with the EU membership:

1. every country has to participate in the co-financing of this large, expensive, highly bureaucratic organization;
2. there are non-negligible domestic costs as a result of the membership (bureaucratic paper work and all kinds of similar requirements, the need to organize endless conferences, meetings, trips abroad, to finance the artificially created EU jobs, etc.);
3. the import of a very heavy and, therefore, economic activity undermining legislation based on excessive regulation, controlling, harmonization, standardization, subsidization;
4. the implementation of an overgenerous and therefore demotivating European welfare system. [...]

The main European problem lies in the European economic and social system that doesn’t allow for a rapid economic growth. The European “soziale Marktwirtschaft”, as it is called in German, prefers social policy based on income redistribution to productive work. It prefers free-time and long holidays to hard work. It prefers consumption to investments, debts to savings, security to risk-taking. All of it is part of a broader civilizational and cultural problem, deeply rooted in the European continent or in most of its countries. It can’t be exterminated overnight, it can’t be changed as a result of one or another EU summit, it can’t be changed by painless cosmetic changes. It requires a deep systemic change, something structurally similar to the task we had to accomplish two decades ago in the moment of the fall of communism. [...]

Riyadh Speech: The European Problems As Seen from Prague
Václav Klaus, 17.01.2012

http://www.klaus.cz/clanky/3021