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Comment by nobodywillobsrv | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem with the EU is that it is built for bureaucrats and as such it is geared towards irreversible "blob" decisions.

Brexit should have been a near no-op. But it was a huge pain. They hadn't even planned for it or thought about it.

EU should have a pre-memeber clearing state that countries stay in and then vote every year or n years to be "in" or "out" of the EU. But part of being in the EU should be to maintain non-in versions of all policies so that members can actually negotiate and easily leave without having huge bureaucratic cost.

This would make the EU stronger and better. Currently, there are many terrible undemocratic institutions that are being used to ruin countries.

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> “But part of being in the EU should be to maintain non-in versions of all policies so that members can actually negotiate and easily leave without having huge bureaucratic cost.”

So countries should maintain two sets of all regulations — the actual ones and then also parallel hypothetical ones — and this would somehow reduce bureaucratic cost rather than double it?

The execution of Brexit ought to put to rest the notion that “we’ll make our own rules!” somehow would save money or improve anything. Britain has accomplished exactly nothing except recreate local bureaucracies they had already managed to eliminate because of harmonized EU rules.

> Brexit should have been a near no-op. But it was a huge pain.

How was it ever going to be a "near no-op"? Putting everything else aside, Northern Ireland was always going to be huge sticking points. Ireland would make sure it was.

Besides, it was in the EU's self-interest to maximise the pain for the UK, in order to discourage other member states from going the same way - and the EU succeeded. Marine Le Pen no longer talks about "Frexit", instead she proposes reforming the EU from within.

The UK were just being difficult and asking for things they knew they couldn't have. Like to join the single market for services but not for products. That breaks one of the most fundamental values of the EU. This is what made Brexit negotiations so difficult. And of course there was the northern Ireland issue with which they didn't even know what to do themselves.

Also, them constantly replacing their negotiatiors didn't help. But at least they're out now.

> EU should have a pre-memeber clearing state that countries stay in and then vote every year or n years to be "in" or "out" of the EU. But part of being in the EU should be to maintain non-in versions of all policies so that members can actually negotiate and easily leave without having huge bureaucratic cost.

Do the United States have a system like that?

Down here we had a minor discussion in the 1800s about how the states and federal government should be run.

General consensus since then has been that states can’t leave, but who knows! Things could change.

I see. Arguably Brexit was less painful than that discussion.

Ah yes ... in addition to all the existing bureacratic costs of the EU, we should add "constantly maintain a parallel set of rules so that member states can leave easily and cheaply whenever they want".

Why on earth would the EU do that? Why would any organization put in huge effort to ensure that its members could easily and cheaply leave at any time?

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