The economic stagnation in Europe today is not entirely the fault of the EU bureaucracy, writes Francis Menton in Manhattan Contrarian. Each member state is responsible for its own overspending and overregulation. The EU bureaucracy, however, has been growing unchecked to the determent of future growth, dynamism and human freedom.
What businesses and industries are potentially damaged by Britain’s exiting the EU? Perhaps the most severely damaged is “the UK’s crown jewel”—the London financial sector. Mr. Menton argues that is why “all the existing poo-bahs are for ‘stay’.”
Boris Johnson … summarizes this argument as “the campaign of fear.” And I think he is right. The extent of business disruption from exit is unknown and may be nothing. The EU could impose its external tariff on the UK, but then again, it may well not. Doing so would be just as disruptive for EU businesses as for UK businesses (although perhaps more widely disbursed in the EU). Moreover, Switzerland is not a member of the EU, but is in on the free trade agreement. What’s so hard about the UK doing that?
The EU has become fundamentally an anti-democratic project, what goes under the name of “progressive” in the United States, for turning over more and more of governance to an unelected, unaccountable class of “experts” in a distant capital who will then supposedly run things so much better than the stupid hoi polloi can run their own lives. And it’s not just that the existing Brussels bureaucrats are “progressive” in their outlook and direction. It’s that they are completely insulated and isolated from democratic processes. With each passing day and year they seize to themselves more and more power; and there is no limiting principle to stop them or to say how far this can go. Nobody knows who they are or how they get their jobs. And there is no process by which they can be voted out when they overreach — which they do more and more with every passing day.
A rebuttal to the Remain Campaign by the Leave Campaign here:
