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Comment by badestrand | Hacker News Reader

You mean, it's good to have _even more_ bad regulations?

Or rather, if a little bit of X is bad, why would you want more of X?

If you look at what I responded to then you see that it was about every country having their own rules. "More EU" would mean harmonizing them in the sense that they are all the same and you'd have a single regulatory body.

I don't see how less EU would make this particular problem any easier. It would certainly give you an even harder time to deal with 20+ states that all impose import bureaucracy. That's exactly what the EU was founded to solve, but the menber states are populisting against it, not unlike your comment.

What about the argument of these regulations not existing in the first place were it not for the EU?

Without the EU you wouldn't have a single set of annoying overly-bureaucratic bloc-wide regulation for trade between member states, you'd have a bunch of bilateral agreements between individual countries. You might not be paying a new tax to the EU, but instead you'd pay much more for your postal service to file customs paperwork based on declarations you'd have to write. And I'd guess countries would still want you to have a local representative for a bunch of things, not to mention compliance with tens of slightly-different safety standards (think CE).

Maybe it wouldn't be that much worse, but certainly not better than what we have today.

The EU existed for a long time now and you could replace all of this with bilateral organisations focused on narrow topics, rather than a bureaucratic body with an open agenda and no real checks and balances.

I never understand this argument. The same logic would suggest that things like the GPL, CNCF, OCI etc. are somehow harmful when, objectively, it's the opposite. Standardisation and conformity lead to much larger and more efficient ecosystems. Why should it not be the same for the EU?

You think without EU there would be no regulations and everything would be free for all? You must be young or don't remember pre-EU times.

In CS terms, the EU turned an O(n^2) problem, bilateral agreements, into an O(n) problem, everybody trying to get their view into a single body. The advantages should be obvious to anybody knowing O notation.

Again, not to say EU doesn't have problems. But dismantling the EU is not the solution. Improving it is.

Many of the regulations focused on climate change and sustainability wouldn't exist.

Now, of course, it's extremely hard to logically argue against these. But that doesn't mean they aren't extremely annoying to deal with at times.

As in the UK, where we've since gotten rid of all the regulation and live in a halcyon utopia.

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