Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Hoffman

Hoffman slips a big political bet into the polite language of economics: you cannot buy your way into a shared Europe without letting people move. The phrase "not only" does the heavy lifting. It treats the common market as the obvious, respectable first step - tariffs down, trade up - then insists that real integration lives in the messier realm of bodies, wages, and identity. "Great mobility in labor" is a deliberately frictionless euphemism for something voters have always found abrasive: foreign coworkers, shifting demographics, pressure on local labor deals, and the quiet reordering of who gets to belong.

The intent is practical but also ideological. Markets can be harmonized by technocrats; labor mobility forces ordinary life to harmonize, too. It turns Europe from a contract into a neighborhood. That is why it works rhetorically: it recasts migration from a cultural threat into an economic requirement, making resistance sound irrational, even self-sabotaging.

Contextually, this is postwar thinking in a suit: the idea that prosperity and interdependence could make another continental catastrophe harder to repeat. Hoffman, best known as a public figure rather than a policy theorist, speaks in the register of mid-century confidence - growth as diplomacy, logistics as peace. The subtext is also a warning. A Europe that shares goods but walls off workers will produce an uneven, brittle project: capital can chase efficiency while people stay trapped in stagnation. Mobility is the pressure valve, and without it, the "new Europe" is just an old one with better shipping.