The surveillance state is a legitimate fear, but people are seriously overblowing the business threat of Brexit. Trade still exists. It won't be any more diffic

The surveillance state is a legitimate fear, but people are seriously overblowing the business threat of Brexit. Trade still exists. It won't be any more difficult to trade with the EU than it currently is to trade with the US. If anything, there are probably some very real long term benefits that can come from this. Smaller governments (Geographic and demographic small, not %-of-GDP small) have some serious benefits in terms of their ability to adapt to the world around them. For example, a floating currency means that your currency can adapt to your conditions, and not your conditions weighted by your economic impact relative to your peers. A floating currency would have benefited both Greece and Germany during their last economic conundrum. Another benefit is that it is much harder to hide corruption as well as nominally-legal forms of corruption like pork-barrel spending. Special interest groups become much more limited in scope. Democracy is more accountable because it is smaller and can command more attention. Think of any reform attempt like you think of refactoring code. Which program can handle simple refactorings better? The 20k LOC program, or the 2m LOC program? I would be willing to bet that most 2m LOC java programs are still stuck on java6, java7 if they're lucky. If the US were more federated than it currently is, we probably would have switched to the metric system sooner. We probably would have overhauled health care sooner (we might have had 50 different types of health care systems, but we would have reformed them in the 80's instead of 2010 and we would have a very clear picture of which reforms worked well and which ones didn't). It will always be easier to get 50m people on board with an idea than it will be to get 500m people on board. In fact, it might even be easier to reform the ridiculous surveillance state that the UK has going. Brexit might have been led by despicable (IMO) rationales, but from a business/economic perspective the negatives are overblown and nobody is talking about the benefits.