UK Prime Minister David Cameron once toyed with greater EU involvement, but avoided it to placate unreconstructed Thatcherites in the Conservative Party. However, he is quite clear now that Britain avoided a bullet by not joining the Eurozone.

Many good purposes of European union long ago were suffocated by bureaucracy, the delusional form of international government whose relentless will-to-power often challenges national democracy. The Brussels bureaucracy imagined that states like Greece eventually would be forced to whatever austerity measures would allow them to stay in the EU. Or out they'd go. That was the theory.

But, in the case of the Euro, strong states with strong economies (mainly Germany) also have major banks that made unwise investments in countries like Greece. Obviously, the Greeks need to take the medicine that is the only real cure for profligacy. The bureaucrats promised to enforce austerity in such cases.

The bankers in the north, however, don't want to suffer the pain with their debtors. So domestic political pressure is firmly exerted on the bankers' national governments to shift the consequences of Greek folly to northern taxpayers. Thus are the Europeans stuck in a political reality the bureaucrats never anticipated.

(The Greek government has adopted an "acceptable" set of new austerity measures, meanwhile. But it won't be the end of this story.)

Britain at least is prepared to take its own medicine. It doesn't have to take Greece's, too.