Ireland and the Eurozone

It's going to be a long and difficult negotiation for Ireland, the European Central Bank and the IMF. Ireland needs their financial support to the tune of almost 100 billion Euros but the country does not want to give up its low corporate tax rate which has been fixed at 12.5% for many years.
In a comment that was balanced and moderate, something that one can't always say, German Chancellor Merkel said that the Irish corporate tax rate should not be part of the negotiation because every Eurozone country has the the right to independently fix its tax rates.
This is no small matter for Ireland because much of its Celtic Tiger rapid growth came from foreign companies choosing Ireland for their European or international headquarters because of the Irish corporate tax rate, and also, it must be added, because of the highly educated labor pool available in Ireland. To take away its only remaining attraction for corporate investment would make it even harder for Ireland to recover from its current banking disaster.
And Ireland is not alone in this dilemma. Eurozone countries have corporate tax rates for foreign corporations that are 5 to 10 percent higher than Ireland's. And they are feeling the effect in the loss of investment and, with it, jobs. France is a good example. Every time President Sarkozy tries to explain to the French labor unions and the left of the political party spectrum that lower taxes would make it possible to attract new foreign investment into France, with the additional benefits of more taxes coming into the French Treasury and and more jobs being created for French workers, they scream that it would ruin their way of life. Just the opposite is, in fact, true.
The argument was bitterly fought in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, when businesses moved from higher tax-rate states with aggressive union activity to lower tax, union-free states. The jolt was severe. But, finally, the high tax rate states got the message, lowered their taxes, made union membership voluntary, and the corporate activities that had deserted them began to flow back.
It's easy to say that Europe wants to be a homogeneous unity. But, in fact, that's almost impossible to achieve. The United States is certainly not homogeneous in many of the areas where Europe forces unanimity on its members. Each one of the fifty states, for example, fixes its own state tax policies and the federal government cannot interfere.
It's something to think about in Europe. Unity does not need to mean a straight jacket of imposed laws and regulations that are better left to local country jurisdiction.