Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not strongly opinionated on what's wrong with the euro currency, but this is a pretty major issue with the EU generally. There isn't a coherent democratic polity, it's being governed like a trade agreement while acting like much more.

I think Brexit highlighted this big hole. Who spoke for the EU? You'd occasionally see a headshot with a "EU President" title attached to it, which would then be dismissed in favour of the opinion of Merkel or Hollande who didn't even notionally represent the Brttish in any way.

If the EU is to govern so much, it needs a polity that Europeans jointly elect, with representatives that genuinely represent the EU, not local interests. The EU needs a face, parties with cross-border support, democracy, mandate... Even the UN has more of this than the EU. At least it has a face representing it.

I'm not sure this leads to better monetary policy (I don't really believe we confidently know what better monetary policy is), but I do think it's necessary if the EU is going to govern so much.

>The EU needs a face, parties with cross-border support, democracy, mandate...

You know what's funny - US is constantly railing about inequality - meanwhile median income between poorest and richest EU members is close to 10x - in the US it's ~2-3 between states. It's no longer "the 1% are exploiting us" narrative and "democracy will save us" - these are similarly sized countries where people are 10x richer in one compared to the other.

And that's just one easily quantifiable difference of how diverse the EU actually is, broader point is - these are different countries with different culture, history, religion, economies, language, ethnicity, etc. pretending you can bunch them all up in to a single unit and that democracy makes any sense in this context is ridiculous.

"meanwhile median income between poorest and richest EU members is close to 10x - in the US it's ~2-3 between states"

That's comparing apples to oranges. Country != state.

>Country != state.

This is my point

>That's comparing apples to oranges

Which is totally valid, since both are fruit, and we can e.g. compare their nutricional value to decide what to eat. Or their selling price, to decide what to buy. Etc.

>Country != state

That's kind of the parent's whole point. That countries are the closest thing the EU has to states, and that they must get much closer to states for EU to function properly.

For the EU to work, the countries need to function more as states. Maybe this is just the hard road for the EU to get to something resembling the states, or it will fall apart as a failed experiment.

You can rephrase:

> ...the EU to get to something resembling the states,

as:

EU member nations need to have their sovereignty diminished. That's extremely hard to swallow if you're the one losing rights/protections to a foreign institution.

It's hard to swallow if you don't trust the foreign institution you're losing your rights to.

And that's a problem for the EU, because many people don't feel like it does a very good job of listening to people (or even countries). Instead, they feel that it does what it wants, and runs over people who don't like the EU's self-decided plan.

That would be a problem for the US, too (see the approval ratings of either Congress or the president), but we're not having to hand over much new power to either one at the moment, so inertia is working for the US. It's working against the EU.

I agree, and that's the problem with the EU. It is what led to Brexit and may lead to eventual Grexit, then Italy and Spain leaving. The Nordic countries never fully joined for similar reasons.

I wonder if the free movement of people is an unworkable concept without also consistent laws.

Today, yes, but the ideological goal of the EU is to convert it into a US-style federal union (in recent times some of them try to deny this because reality is closing in, but it has always been there). Hence large transfer payments between EU countries in the form of "structural adjustment funds" and euro policy, etc.

Direct voting, like the UK referendum, can lead to impossible situations. People vote for what they wished was the reality, and many times it's just not possible.

You can learn to vote reasonably only if you do it.

I think it's the exact opposite. Direct democracy would lead to people voting for what they want much more granularly, whereas the Brexit vote was once-in-a-generation opportunity that conflated many many different issues (immigration, "ever closer union", single market, London vs. the rest of England, England vs. Scotland, economic inequality, ...). I people were given a chance to vote for each of these issues separately, I would expect much saner (and less contradictory) outcomes...

There was one point where the EU commission president stuck his fingers in his ears and walked away when being asked about Brexit by journalists.

That would be career suicide for a politician, but not for EU bureaucrats.

That's the sort of contempt they hold for the populace of the EU, they couldn't care at all.

Well, that's kind of what the Republicans have been doing when being asked about Trump, lately.

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