Saturday 25 October 2008

The European Union will shorten your life!

No, really, it will.

THE World Health Organisation recently reported that Andorra, that little pocket tucked in the Pyranees, has the highest life expectancy of any country in the world. One can speculate on the many reasons why this would be so: in addition to the mountain air and lifestyle, being well-situated to pick and choose from the best of French and Spanish culinary influences (all in moderation, of course) can't hurt.

It turns out that other little places do pretty well in the life-expectancy league tables too. Another ranking puts Macau, Singapore, San Marino and Guernsey in the top 15 globally. This would seem to bode well for other places in Europe: Malta, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco and the Vatican City are all smaller than Andorra.

You see, people who live in smaller political units, in small countries, live longer than those in larger countries and political units.

And as we know, the aim of the European Union is that we should all end up livingin one large political unit, one large super state, all 500 million of us. Which of course will mean that we will die younger than if we had been left to go our own sweet way in nation states.

See, it's true! The EU will shorten your life!

1 comment:

Mark Wadsworth said...

You're all peddling the same myths.

From Wiki:Andorra is the sixth smallest nation in Europe, after Malta, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco, and the Vatican City.

Andorra has pop. 71,822.

Malta has pop. 419,285, just a tad behind Letzeburg, pop. 480,222.

But the point that the ideal unit of government is a population size somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 still stands.