I wonder if I’m the only one who finds this excerpt from a Der Spiegel interview with Mario Draghi hysterically funny:

Spiegel: Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has proposed giving the EU Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs a direct say in national budgets. What do you think of that proposal?

Draghi: I am fully in favour of it. Governments would be wise to seriously consider it. I firmly believe that, in order to restore confidence in the euro area, countries need to transfer part of their sovereignty to the European level.

Maybe it’s just me, but the bonkers illogic of Draghi’s response is beyond belief. I can best illustrate this by re-expressing both question and answer as follows:

Spiegel: Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble wants to have an unelected clown like Olli Rehn swanning around Europe telling finance ministers what to do. Given Rehn’s department has been wrong about every ClubMed country in succession, and got his last three eurozone forecasts utterly wrong, what do you think about that idea?

Draghi: I am fully in favour of removing all fiscal power from national Governments, and it’s in their interests to seriously consider that for two reasons. First of all, they were elected by idiots who don’t know about anything, and thus their plans have no validity in this technocratic age. And second, they can have faith that the same team (which so royally screwed up in creating the ClubMed disaster, and then caused its cost to quintuple in three years) will do things that restore confidence in the euro area.

None of this Fiskal Union bollocks is going to work, is it? How many finance ministers in the eurozone are going to tolerate a bloke with no political perspective at all drifting in to tear up their plans? What would be the point of electors voting for government promises when they know that some outsider twerp can dismiss the whole idea with a stroke of his pen? How many EU citizens are going to see that as anything other than the thin end of the wedge?

Handing over the reins of fiscal management to a soi-disant technocratic Commissioner is a more formalised way of ending democracy…as opposed to just ringing up Lloyd Blankfein and saying “Can we have another three chaps please?”

Of course, this is precisely the plan. Election results are risks, negative referendum answers are mistakes, and opposition to Big Sister Geli is futile. Vee are goink to have ze superstate, now get used to ze idea you little dago dummkopf. But I would ask this question of all the deluded eurofanatics out there: can anyone at all in their right mind imagine any circumstances under which French finance ministers would allow themselves to be humiliated by the insistence of Belgians and Germans on monitoring and then revising their planned expenditures? Can anyone even see the ENAs doing that?

It’s not ever going to happen without some calamitous disaster hitting the French State first. Which, perhaps, is what all the foot-dragging in Berlin is about. We shall see.