ABSTRACT
The basic assumption of academic economic and political theory is that every nation acts in its self-interestand is enlightened about how to achieve it. This implies that most nations should follow a similar economic, financial and tax strategy. No Western democracy could have sustained the Baltics social devastation, declining birth rates, troubling worker injury rates, accelerating emigration, and an oligarchic tax structure. Ironically, emulating Europes successful post-World War II development calls for not joining the eurozone as currently run by the pro-bank, anti-labor ideologues who designed the Lisbon agreements and created the euro without a central bank to monetize budget deficits to fuel economic expansion. The neoliberal version of a free market is a travesty of the classical economic tradition. It is a road to financial dependency, trade dependency, debt peonage and represents a classic case of capture to a Stockholm syndrome rather than independence.
