Foreign correspondent  

Matthew Yglesias, blogging from Florence, is complaining about the price differential in museum entrance fees for EU citizens vs the rest of us.

In all seriousness, though, I do wonder what the rationale for this policy is supposed to be. The economic logic behind age-based price discrimination is pretty clear, but I can't see any logic behind citizenship-based discrimination.

He goes on to say it's some kind of attempt to create an EU dientity of some kind. But I think this is actually a lot simpler, and very similar to the age based discrimination he mentions. Non-EU-citizens are probably tourists, which means they have money to spend on museum entrances and it's pretty much a given that they're going to spend it. I've seen this before - the extreme case being the Taj Mahal, which charged something like $20 per foreign tourist and maybe 1/100 of that price for Indian nationals.