Comment by wobbleblob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wobbleblob | Hacker News Reader

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People like you are repeating that 'anti-democratic' mantra all the time, without really explaining what they mean.

When politicians hear people say 'not democratic enough!', they think you mean 'more power to the EU parliament' (elected directly) and less to the European Commission (one member per member state, chosen by your own elected government), but that's not what they want, is it? What they really mean is they want it to be less democratic, because democracy makes it look like a state. So when people call it anti-democratic, what they really mean is they want to do away with the democratic elements altogether.

The EU made it possible to drive from the Baltic to the Algarve without having to ask permission, without armed border guards searching your luggage... seven times! It made flying from Belgium to Italy as easy and pain free as flying from Atlanta to Pensacola.

Why people reject the freedom to travel is beyond me. I loved every minute of it, while it lasted...

It's not just open borders or free trade. It's about removing barriers and red tape hindering free travel and trade. It's about making sure that the car you bought in Estonia isn't stopped at he border in Spain because of different safety regulations, ending your trip to the Algarve in tears. It's about not getting in trouble because the food you bought in France on the way back doesn't meet the regulations in Austria.

I'm old enough to remember the difference. You, I assume, are not. The EU has brought a massive amount of freedom. Actual freedom and freedom from red tape, but all people want to talk about is burocracy. This burocracy is working to straighten out the differences between countries that caused tons and tons red tape in the past. That's a lot of work, there were a lot of differences.

People keep talking about a waste of money. The total budget of the EU was 143 billion euro in 2014, roughly comparable to the government budget of Finland (5 million people). To put that in perspective, the total federal budget of the US is something in the order of 4 trillion. It's really a budget price for something of such a massive scope.

To the people trying to take this away: thanks a lot. Why they hate freedom, I'll never understand.

I don't live in the UK, so I don't have a memory of either condition, except indirectly.

The 'undemocratic' element, I suppose, is that the elected parliament of the EU appears to me to be its weakest component. The commission and the council seem notably more powerful and are both unelected (except quite indirectly).

Now, I don't disagree with you that free travel, trade and relocation are good things. What I don't quite understand is why it was ever necessary to have a European Union in order to achieve that. It seems to me that this could have and should have been achieved without such a heavy-handed institution.

There's another one of these loaded terms: 'heavy handed'.

In what way has the EU influenced your every day life, other than the freedom to travel? Where is this European oppression people are suffering under? Is the EU police beating people up? European army soldiers marching down the street?

The only answer people can come up with, if you really press them, is that they don't like all these foreigners. It's a vicious cycle. Headlines about foreigners doing bad things sell papers, so every bad thing foreigners are involved in makes it to the headlines. And with so many of thousands of Poles and Romanians in the country, there will be a drunk driver, a brawl, an accident, an incident every day.

People and media whipping each other up in a frenzy.

Again, I don't live in the EU, so it has not influenced my life in the slightest.

I'd refer to it as heavy handed because of the regulatory burdens it imposes upon its member countries. It represents a super-government enacting laws and regulations that impact every citizen of the member country's with only an indirect accountability to the electorate.

Here is an instance of the EU going after Google:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/25/11490452/why-eu-antitrust-...

Whatever you think of this particular action, this is a broad power, imposed on behalf of all the members states. Similarly with the 'right to be forgotten' law. The power to implement these kinds of things is, in my view, 'heavy-handed' and overbroad if your goal is simply to facilitate free movement of people and goods. Why is the EU telling Google it has to forget people?

The reason, in my view, is that power naturally moves up the stack when there is another place for it to move up to. So, because the EU sits on top of its member nations, it will gradually acquire more and more power over time. This is not inherently good or bad, of course. It's just the way the world works. But it can be bad if that organization is insufficiently transparent and democratic, and it also can be bad if there is an economic heterogeneity to the composing countries.

This is particularly evident with the Euro (which I realize the UK does not use), but it can be true with other economic policies. But in the case of the Euro, you have countries like Greece that vastly overspent and totally screwed themselves with debt because of the cheap credit the Euro allowed them. Ordinarily in a situation like that, the offending country would simply print more of its own money, causing inflation and pain for its population - which would then shift the political discourse of that country toward fixing the inflation - achievable primarily through genuine economic reforms. But in Greece this didn't happen and doesn't seem likely to, and this is, in my view, because they don't control the currency. They can't inflate away their debts, so they are stuck, and the people of Greece blame the EU and the EU blames the people of Greece. But the truth is that they're both right - the structure of the EU prevents Greece from fixing the problem itself - but of course Greece is responsible for creating it in the first place.

Now, I realize the above is not the same as the UK and that the UK does not use the Euro. That is just a convenient example of what kinds of problems are entailed by having a sort of shadow economic government over and above the regular one. That there is a sort of impedance mismatch that precludes natural economic realignment because power is split up in an awkward and nonsensical way that promotes the interests of the larger body over the interests of its member entities, but does so in an incomplete, indirect way.

I guess what I am saying is that if you want a unified Europe you should have an actually unified Europe under a single government. But having this pseudo-government in charge of economic things and some other stuff, but then not other things will end up creating these barriers to natural economic fluctuations that will ultimately harm the entire continent.

It's minor, sure, but the EU is responsible for the widespread deployment of "we use cookies, hope that's cool" banners. Even if you don't think it's as stupid as I do, it's definitely an example of the EU impacting business all over the world.

I fully agree with you, however to correct your figures about Finland, the budget is 55 billion. http://vm.fi/en/the-budget

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