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Comment by t0bia_s | Hacker News Reader

We should seriously ask, if being part of EU is beneficial or not. Electing left or right is just a game to keep system working. But it serves to scrap responsibility from us and lead to slavery with every new regulation.

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We shouldn't leave, we should reform!

That means power taken from the committee and brought to parliament. So the decision-making becomes more politicized, and thus more public. Politicizing isn't great, but without it the committee van fly under the radar. Moreover, without it the committee is fully beholden to the national governments, who won't be held to account for their decisions.

I've stopped taking the whole "change it from withing / reform" arguments seriously when it comes to anything larger than a village or small community. The entire system has gotten to this point because the rules, processes and incentives all aligned and co-evolved to get it here. Every single one of those "memes" (borrowing from Dawkins here) will fight very hard for its own survival. And their survival depends on the status-quo staying as is without change.

The only way forward is to not participate and/or burn it all down and start from scratch. And we all know what a polite and neutered society we are currently because things are relatively "okay" for us, so we're not at threat, so we're not willing to do the drastic measures necessary for correction here. That includes me, as I will not be sending my sons to the slaughter.

>The only way forward is to not participate and/or burn it all down and start from scratch.

You can't honestly suggest that. From where? "village or small community" level?

You can still legally leave the EU. But this draconian law has not passed yet and has been up many times before, most likely it wont pass.

It's not a perfect answer, and one can "not participate" in more ways than one. Also, it depends on the individual and what makes sense for them and their family.

It's also a case of "picking your poison". So if the recent war wasn't happening, I'd be moving straight to Russia as right now it seems to be the sanest when it comes to these specific things. But that comes with dealing with some of the "negatives" as I'm sure you all can imagine.

If money wasn't a problem, personally I'd fund some sort of island or floating-island community to promote self-sustainable practices whilst staying as far as practically possible from the craziness going on in the west.

If you leave the EU who are people in your country going to vote for? Most likely, either the right or the left.

Leaving the EU doesn't automatically make a country not right/left/whatever. Even before the EU most countries had the same thing. The UK left and still have left/right/whatever. You need to change a lot more than EU membership status to avoid the whole left/right issue.

It’s funny that those chat censorship laws seems to be mostly at EU level. Very few countries have something similar going on locally.

Probably because they know it's not politically popular. As members of the EU, they can work with their commissioners to bring in unpopular legislation and then blame the eu if anyone complains. The UK used to do this a lot, and I expect other countries do it too.

I don't know if youre trying to imply I said any thing about the censorship law, but all I was pointing out was that leaving the EU doesn't change anything about parent's idea about voting left/right/whatever.

What I'm saying, it looks like those are pushed at EU level seemingly by bureaucratic apparatus regardless of ruling parties. Yet such ideas seem to be nowhere to be found at home, again regardless of ruling parties.

I'm probably wrong, but my gut feeling is that euro bureaucracy is playing it's own game. And it has little in common with democracy, citizen rights and citizen will at large. Infamous Juncker's phrase about how to push through unpopular regulations is the modus operandi of those people.

What I'm saying is why are you commenting it to me? I don't care either way. There's other comments that your reply would fit better under. Trying to drag everyone into an EU good/EU bad discussion is not what everyone wants. I simply stated that leaving the EU doesn't make left/right disappear, which is true. You can argue your separate point to me all you want, but I dont really care.

Leaving the EU, however, triggers competition. These small European countries will compete for talent/money/knowledge and that means more freedom and less taxes.

But hey gotta deny the EU is not working even after hitting the wall and your face is dangling from the other side right?

I didn't say anything about it working or not, did I? The only thing I pointed out was that that leaving the EU isn't going to change parent's idea about leaving the EU to avoid voting left or right. Your comment doesn't apply or mean anything to me. I don't live in Europe nor do I follow all their politics enough to have a skin in the game.

Centralised government and power is much more dangerous for society, than decentralised nations.

Im not sure why someone in Brusell should vote about regulations for entire Europe.

You cannot imply same rules for entire nations like all are the same. They are not. They have different cultures, different values, different taxes, different wealth, etc...

> You cannot imply same rules for entire nations like all are the same. They are not. They have different cultures, different values, different taxes, different wealth, etc...

I'm not implying anything. I'm stating the fact that partisanship is not only dictated by EU membership. Maybe you're correct, maybe not, I dont really care, but it has nothing to do with my comment. Please try again with someone else who cares as much as you do.

It's the governments of the EU countries that are agreeing to this in the Council (apparently it's going through because France is lifting its veto). If enough people cared about this, they would put pressure on their governments to scrap this. But this is not ever talked about except in these circles (unlike, say, the migration pact).

Leaving the EU hasn’t really been helping the UK either

Sure, voting system remains same.

It hasn't really been hurting them either. By the way, UK had GDP growth by .6% in first quarter of this year, which is a lot more than a lot of other EU countries.

Presumably Signal will remain available in the UK. At least, it could.

Yes, at this point I see no way forward except with the EU. Unless each individual country wants to go at it alone and eventually end up working as a Vasal state to either USA, Russia, or China.

The cost of products and manufacturing is so low that a significant part of the final price is made up of overhead costs such as tax, tariffs, and transport. All of these will go up by stepping out of the EU due to increased friction.

If anything, we should go a lot further into embracing the EU. In the current political landscape we are committed.

Current nonEU members like Switzerland or England are vasals of who?

Prices of energy and basically everything in EU is so ridiculous high. Free marked is crippled because of centrally planed economics pushed by EU grants.

Switzerland applies many many EU-regulations without having a say in it.

They also pay towards EU funds.

They are also part of Schengen.

Other countries have also seen inflation of prices of energy and other things. I doubt any of this would become cheaper if you leave the eu.

Oh yes, EU has a solution! Its called CBDC. No cash, no different currency, just digital numbers. Im sure they solve inflation made by fiat money.

you can have an economic community without the political aspect of it

What does that look like? Let's say you have a large exporting country that decides its exporting needs are more important than the employment needs of other countries in the block, how do you handle that without political alignment? Economic community is political community. The only question is what flavour of economic community, which IMO is where the EU has gone well off track.

Unfortunately, these days economic community is not enough. With the US slowly falling apart due to internal polarization, rusia and china trying to grap as much power as they can, Middle East far from stable, and the disrupting impact of climate change, focusing only on the economy ignores our biggest problems.

If you put ideology on first place, competition will crush you easily. China don't care about environment and they make high fortune on it, like other countries did previously.

What frustrate me most is how EU sponsor their business from our taxes in name of care about environment. Ie grants on photovoltaic panels that are made from 95% in China or donated EV's that ruin traditional car manufacturing in EU.

China will (and does to a certain extent) care about the environment because they know it will eventually be a massive problem for them. Their single-party state has only managed to stay in power because it's been very good at driving up the standards of living. And you can only pollute so much before those standards stop going up and people start to get displeased, which is why they've been trying so hard to move up the value chain and export their pollution to other countries (via cheap loans).

Which doesn't change anything I wrote above. Pollution is made and driven by centrally planed economics from our taxes.

I think the widening of the EU that we have seen precludes the deepening of the EU that you advocate. This is a difficult balance. we should want deeper coordination within the EU. But we should also want to help and integrate our neighbors, rather than seeing them languish and become, as you put it, vassal states. And those goals are at odds.

This is partially because coordinating more countries is inherently more difficult if everyone can veto. But cultural diversity also plays a role. Deepening coordination means letting the EU decide more. Letting a more similar culture decide more will feeo better. beyond that, they are probably more likely to decide what you would have decided anyway. That is how a wider EU works against a deeper EU.

But the good thing about the EU and a lot of its programmes is that the future generations in each are more and more well-travelled and more and more accepting of other members' cultures. Even nowadays the attitude towards, say, Poland in most younger circles in the West is much more positive than it used to be 20 years ago. Give it enough time and the people of the bloc will learn how to deal with their neighbours' cultures.

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