The other day I read an article stating that the European Union wants to hand out 20 or 30 thousand free interrail tickets. This is so wrong on so many levels.. where do I even start? There are four good reasons for the EU to give up on this foolish plan..
The other day I read an article stating that the European Union wants to hand out 20 or 30 thousand free interrail tickets. This is so wrong on so many levels.. where do I even start?
First of all, the EU was founded to increase economic collaboration and reduce armed conflicts between it’s member states, not to hand out free holidays to a select few at the expense of everyone else.
Secondly, it is well known that people don’t appreciate what they get for free as much as what they earned through their own labour. It would be much more effective to use this money to make interrail tickets cheaper. In 2014 around 230.000 tickets were sold, so they could use the value of the 20 or 30 thousand “free” tickets to make interrail around 10% cheaper for everybody. Not even mentioning the money spent on deciding who will get the free tickets, for which they will probably establish a workgroup of some sort, manned by highbrow civil servants.
Thirdly, how would they even decide who gets these tickets? As yet this has not been disclosed. Will it be a lottery? Then possibly some people would get a ticket who could easily afford it themselves. Will everyone have to write a story on why they deserve the ticket? Would be interesting, but who will read and judge thousands of stories? Or will they give the tickets to the poorest applicants, which makes the whole idea a robin-hood kind of money-redistribution exercise? There are no right answers here, but it does lead me to the fourth counter-argument: the EU is becoming too big.
So fourthly and lastly: this is another one of those EU ideas that sound nice but mostly benefit the EU itself: the more money they are managing, the more powerful they are. This is money that belongs in our (taxpayers) pockets but is now in the pockets of civil servants in Brussels who are free to spend it on your behalf on things nobody really needs. Bah humbug!
Sorry for the rant on Sunday morning .. I did interrail 4 or 5 times (earning most of the money myself doing odd jobs) and loved every one of them. I think these tickets deserve to be cheaper and more accessible to young people, but this proposal is not the right way to go about it.