>>Tom Wade wrote in USMA 17518 regarding the euro:
>
>>Only Ireland, France & Denmark
>>allowed its people a say in this very fundamental change (an issue which is far
>>more important than weights & measures).
>
>
>That is a matter of taste. Business men and scientists would differ in
>their evaluations. ...
I wasn't just comparing currency and measurement systems, I was comparing
the Maastricht Treaty and measurement systems. The former covered a lot of
ground besides a common currency, and included significant restrictions on
the use of the national veto. Thus it had a far more legal and constitutional
impact than whether we use inches or centimeters to measure.
In any case, committing to a common currency does involve a certain amount of
loss of political power, whereas changing the measurement system does not.
A country with its own currency has the ability to set the interest and
exchange rates. By joining the common currency, we surrendured those powers.
There isn't an equivalent loss of control in changing from imperial to
metric.
Having said that, I still believe that we were right to join the euro. Whereas
in theory we no longer can control our interest rates, in practice given the
small size of our country (< 4 million people) international market forces
would necessarily restrict our freedom here. Of what use is the freedom to
control interest rates if we had to raise them higher than would be good for us
in order to protect the currency ?
It should be noted that such arguments may not hold for a bigger country like
the UK. It is therefore important to keep the two issues of the euro and
metric quite apart over there; opponents of metric are only too happy to
extend opposition to the euro (which may be rationally based on the above
arguments, or irrationally based on the not-invented-here syndrome) to
oppposition to metric (which is firmly based on the latter).
If the relative values of the currencies were locked (as is the case for the
meter and the yard) then you would be right: one would provide a measure of
an objects physical dimensions and the other a measure of its commercial
value (with the added advantage of putting currency speculators out of a job).
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