Timo Soini: Why I Don't Support Europe's Bailouts

Via The Cobden Centre, I discovered this incredible article in the Wall Street Journal by Timo Soini, leader of the True Finns party.

Daniel Hannan also highlighted it:

Hannan’s First Law, long-standing readers will recall, holds that no party is Eurosceptic while in office. No one has yet broken it: not Ian Paisley nor Václav Klaus nor even Margaret Thatcher. Will Timo Soini, the brave, devout, amiable, Millwall-obsessed leader of the True Finns, be the exception?

If the WSJ article is anything to go by, things look promising:

At the risk of being accused of populism, we'll begin with the obvious: It is not the little guy who benefits. He is being milked and lied to in order to keep the insolvent system running. He is paid less and taxed more to provide the money needed to keep this Ponzi scheme going. Meanwhile, a symbiosis has developed between politicians and banks: Our political leaders borrow ever more money to pay off the banks, which return the favor by lending ever more money back to our governments.

In a true market economy, bad choices get penalized. Instead of accepting losses on unsound investments—which would have led to the probable collapse of some banks—it was decided to transfer the losses to taxpayers via loans, guarantees and opaque constructs such as the European Financial Stability Fund.

The money did not go to help indebted economies. It flowed through the European Central Bank and recipient states to the coffers of big banks and investment funds.

Further contrary to the official wisdom, the recipient states did not want such "help," not this way. The natural option for them was to admit insolvency and let failed private lenders, wherever they were based, eat their losses.

The whole article is well worth reading.

We must wait and judge him by his actions, but it's hard to imagine the leader of a powerful UK party even talking this way. From what I've seen so far, the world needs more politicians like Timo Soini.

UPDATE:

As it happens, Soini was featured on tonight's Newsnight. I only caught the end of the interview (followed by some truly ridiculous punditry). I'll try to find time to watch it properly once it's available on iPlayer.