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Comment by grive | Hacker News Reader

"Enormous power"; do not paint it as if it were a confederacy.

The EU has been a scapegoat in Britain for decades. The elites used it to justify many a policy that would hurt the middle class, while pushing for more and more liberalization once in the EU parliament.

The average guy in Britain is just as much at fault here for not following what has been happening. They kept reading their fucking tabloids, the reality-check will be harsh and gruesome.

No, it's not a compelling reason for the UK to leave. It was a compelling reason for the average Briton to learn and educate himself. Now they shot themselves in the foot. Well done!

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The problem the EU has always had is that it wasn't really unified and that non elected officials held to much sway over countries. Countries, not states, not territories, or such. Meaning that you had distinct separation, governments, and the like, being controlled by people not of the same. This will always lead to strife.

If anything vote simply reaffirms that EU favoring side either failed to communicate properly why it was good to stay or worse, failed to recognize or acknowledge real issues that existed and take action to explain them or fix them. As in, far too often the exit crowd was portrayed and ignorant, bigoted, or worse, and you do not convince people your side is right when you attack them

plus it benefits the EU to make it all doom and gloom because this loose grouping was never bound to be successful without more tight knit integration, something they knew they could not sell.

Is the EU really that bad?!

I had the feeling that they forced countries to do the right thing, for example granting human rights. Even here in Germany we had laws that let you lock up people forever.

What was the bad stuff that happend in the EU?

The "crisis" was mostly due to the "elected" governments of the countries which have now financial problems.

What the EU did in the last years was mainly telling "the people" that they elected a bunch of assholes that milked their countries dry.

The Remain campaign never made any positive points about staying in the EU (apart from a few in the Labour party talking about workers rights, but they got about 4% airtime and very little newspaper coverage). The vast majority of the Remain campaign was all about the terrible consequences of leaving.

The Leave campaign was a mix of fear of foreigners, fear of unaccountable bureaucracy and a vision of a Britain that had "taken back control".

The purely negative vision lost.

(There are also those that say that the Eurozone was doomed to failure because of the imbalances in the countries involved with no mechanisms to rectify those imbalances - making the fact that the EU stepped in and replaced two democratically elected governments an inevitability. So it engineered a bad situation then punished the losers in that situation for falling into it. But I don't know enough about economics to argue that point)

Maybe you should look up stuff like 'Vorratsdatenspeicherung'. The EU is literally demanding (and receiving) money from Germany because the haven't implemented this law yet. The reason they have not is that is was against the German constitution and it was rejected by the Bundesgerichtshof.

Now the law is coming back and a argument of the supporters is that its about EU integration and cost.

The law is very clearly against western principles, surveillance for everybody even if they did nothing.

This is just one example, the EU is used to push threw laws that can not get threw on National level and then get imposed top town.

The EU gets much better coverage then they deserve because people are into the idea of "Europe United, No War" but nobody really knows or cares much beyond that.

> The "crisis" was mostly due to the "elected" governments of the countries which have now financial problems.

Maybe you should look at this graph:

http://worthwhile.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451688169e20176155c5...

The left the question about debt open (legally) but gave the impression that it would be common. The market assumed so, and this provided false incentives for all the governments. When the debt was not common, as you can see, the bond yields spread again and some of the nations were not able to role over their debt.

Instead of fully committing to the idea of not sharing debt and letting Greece default, they don't allow that and keep Greece limping along. This is the worst of all ways because nobody knows what to expect form the EU.

The ECB has also not helped the case by conducting monetary policy so badly, that it has lead to something so bad that its only comparison is the the Great Depression. Their are multiple nations in Europe that are doing worse then they did in the GD. The GD on a global scale was far worse then what happened this time, but Europe is the outlier and that has mostly to do with the EMU and the ECB mismanagement.

Its unbelievably hard for Greece to service debt and reform while also having a NGDP that is dropping like crazy. No nation on the planet could deal with that. Greece is poor but they are not flexible, so going the forced price/wage deflation route is also not gone be easy (thats essentially what some of the Balics did).

To be fair to the ECB, even if they did do everything perfectly, they would still not be able to do a perfect job. Their is broad agreement about that in the research area of common currency zones. The problem of uniformity is quite real. Compare the NGDP of Germany and Greece. Germany in the same monetary union has a growing NGDP, the NGDP of Greece is lower then it was in 2008.

The EU and specially the EMU has totally disgraced the hole project of european union. Now the nations hate each other, calling "them" lazy or nazis in newspapers. When the project was mostly about Free Trade and Free Movement it was growing together.

Now we could get into a hole lot more issues such as the other horrible protectionist polices and the cartel enforcement that they do. Their are many other issues but this post is already to long.

tl:dr; The EU(specially EMU) is a horrible institution that is horribly managed in almost every way, specially everything that relates to economics.

There has been a mood that the EU has benefited many of those who were more educated and better off while many blue color working class members of British society were left very much behind.

Sure there's the immediate market shock of a decision the market didn't expect, but we can't say for sure that end result in one, two, or five years will be more negative than positive for those Britons.

Are you saying the UK will be better off without a "successful class?"

Many of those highly educated will migrate to the continent. The working class voters who sided with Leave have shot themselves in the foot.

> "No, it's not a compelling reason for the UK to leave. It was a compelling reason for the average Briton to learn and educate himself. Now they shot themselves in the foot. Well done!"

Au contraire, mon frère. There were compelling reasons for the UK to leave the EU, they're just clearly reasons you either don't know about or don't care much about.

To give one example, the Five Presidents report from 2015 made it clear that there would be a push towards greater integration of the Eurozone, and there were fairly clear implications for what this would mean for the UK.

https://euobserver.com/economic/129218

""The world’s second largest economy cannot be managed through rule-based cooperation alone," says the report, drawn up by the heads of the European Commission, the EU Council, Eurogroup, the European Parliament and the European Central Bank (ECB)."

"The eurozone “will need to shift from a system of rules and guidelines for national economic policy-making to a system of further sovereignty sharing within common institutions, most of which already exist and can progressively fulfil this task," it adds."

""In practice, this would require member states to accept increasingly joint decision-making on elements of their respective national budgets and economic policies.""

"These changes should be possible witin the current EU treaty but other ideas such as eurozone finance ministry by 2025 are likely to require treaty changes.

“Euro area member states would continue to decide on taxation and the allocation of budgetary expenditures according to national preferences and political choices. However, as the euro area evolves towards a genuine EMU, some decisions will increasingly need to be made collectively while ensuring democratic accountability and legitimacy.”"

So with all that in mind, you can see that 'rule-based co-operation' was seen as not effective enough, and that moves were being made to set up a EU Treasury, which would control taxation throughout the Eurozone. The UK would clearly have been marginalised at this point, as the Treasury would be incentivised to make sure investment from Eurozone countries stayed within the Eurozone. However, even with this compromised position, they wouldn't have been able to strike new trade deals on their own terms as the responsibility for doing so had been taken over by the EU.

This is just one example of many, and I'd say the democratic issues in the EU were even more problematic than the financial ones. You can try to pretend that Leave voters were uninformed if it makes you happy, but there were legitimate concerns about the EU, including concerns that had nothing to do with racism.

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