People are generally selfish and lazy. We act in immediately efficient ways even if those ways have high long-term costs—balloon payments and so forth. We do th

People are generally selfish and lazy. We act in immediately efficient ways even if those ways have high long-term costs—balloon payments and so forth. We do this individually and we do it when we band together in companies and nations. At the extremes, there are two ways to deal with selfishness and laziness. You can let it go, allowing people to make their own choices and face their own consequences, hoping they'll have enough foresight to avoid ballooning dangers. In economics and government this is generally associated with "conservative" politics. Or you can control people through rule-making and enforcement, preventing them from making choices they should know will end up bad and forcing them to take the right actions. This is associated with—somewhat unexpectedly—the "liberal" approach. It's pretty clear that either extreme is a bad choice. Pure conservatism allows the wealthy and powerful few to exploit the oppressed many, the large corporation to crush the individual, the effective short-term competitor to ignore long-term costs to self and others. Pure liberalism crushes individual choice, presumes the wise choice of those who rule, sustains complex legal and enforcement systems, and adds the profound inefficiency of government to the many expenses a society must bear. Yet anything in between the two extremes is difficult. Ambiguity abounds. No single choice for a conservative or liberal approach—in health care, for example, or gun control, or airport security, or child rearing—is clearly correct and without serious downsides. People are difficult. Living together is hard. If there is a clear error, therefore, it is an over-enthusiasm for one extreme or the other, an over-pessimism for the other side of the aisle. What's more, one's own self-bias is all but impossible to see. This article begins with pretensions of objectivity that the author compares, if vaguely, to mathematics, yet the bias of the author shines through unmistakable. He searches for objective premises from which to argue, yet even the way he frames the questions, even the premises he chooses to expound all but guarantee his conclusions. And so here we are: difficult people, trying to live together, discussing—or pretending to—how best to do so, yet choked full of our own biases and unwilling (because we are selfish and lazy) to really hear the other side. And that's too bad, because the right answer is surely a blend, a case-by-case blend, of freedom and legislation. When you compare the laws of the EU to nations contemporary and historical, I think it's pretty clear that it skews liberal and that there is a great deal of legislation: legislation "for their own good." It's possible that the EU has good legislation, a good amount of legislation, and that it is effective in enforcing that legislation such that the member nations have done, are doing, and will do better than they would without the union. (Not just economically better but morally, ecologically, etc.—whatever values we ought to care about. Though that's not clear.) But it also reasonable to wonder whether the EU is incorrectly skewed toward too much legislation, or of the wrong kind, or with bad enforcement, so that the member nations, or perhaps a single member nation, would do "better" (by some sound standard) removing itself from these laws. It helps in making these speculations that the EU, after all, is quite new in historical terms; Britons can look back even in their own memories and know what life without the EU might look like. There's no going back really, of course, but there is some historical basis for speculation. They can also look at their own values and culture and look for broad compatibilities or incompatibilities that might bode well or ill for the ongoing relationship. It seems to me that the choice comes down to those kinds of questions. Were Britons better off before the EU, and if so, do they have a reasonable chance of returning, post-EU, to a similar or better situation? Is the rule of the EU over the UK, considered historically, abnormally invasive, complex, or incompetent, or is it on the other hand effective in legislation and enforcement? So I think it's a historical, not mathematical or even—quite—logical question.