To the ordinary man the workings of a country’s economy are an ongoing headache.

The all pervasive media are forever warning with cries of a two dip recession, high unemployment rates, shrinking economic growth, higher inflation rate, and so on.

It is enough to make one feel… is it all worth the candle?

The way one’s earning and spending should be managed in the single family unit is within ordinary human comprehension. One strives to live within one’s means, keeping spending below earnings, and putting if possible something aside for a rainy day. One endeavours to raise standards by increasing work-earnings and wise investment, borrowing only with a prospect for increase in earning power and avoiding deficit budgeting if at all possible.

But all this does not seem to hold where national economics comes in. Here economic growth must be sustained and increased at all costs, consumer spending kept up and buoyant, state spending in infrastructure and welfare maintained regardless of the ever mounting national debt; all this while the spectre of a massive national debt waits daily at our tables like a Banquo at the banquet, silently threatening default, and economic collapse.

Confidence, we are told, is essential, being apprehensive is negative and only promotes the downward trends in the market place, where there is no room for Jeremiahs.

We are continuously fed the latest ups and downs of the Dow Jones, the FTSE and the MIB Indices, the latest hurtful price of a barrel of crude oil, the devastation left behind by Irene along the US East coast, the inhuman cruelty of bloody rebellions, the wiping out of populations by famine and anarchy in parts of Africa, and so on.

Yet in spite of all, we know deep down that hope still rules and that economic turbulence is best faced squarely, and with a good measure of self-belief.

Pessimism is not on the cards as is also thinking the unthinkable. Indeed we should be doing a disservice to the grand idea of a United Europe as conceived by the great political visionaries of our time, Schumann, Adenauer, DeGasperi, Churchill, were we to lose our nerve now after half a century of hard earned progress.

As Churchill once quoted in the darkest days of WWII:

“In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

But westward look, the land is bright.”

Joseph A Muscat,

Ta’Xbiex