9 ms·

Just out of curiosity, what is your country? There are many countries at the moment that this could apply to, but most are already in the Euro which so far is a

by dpwm 8y ago

Just out of curiosity, what is your country? There are many countries at the moment that this could apply to, but most are already in the Euro which so far is a one-way trip. > I won't trade sovereignity for convenience, regardless of social engineering coming from Bruxelles or Merkel. This sounds a lot like Brexit leave campaign rhetoric and I suspect is the reason you're being downvoted. Regardless of how you feel about the EU and Brexit, sovereignty has to be one of the weaker aspects. Disliking the EU is fine, but let's be honest about why. Consider the origin of most nation states. Smaller autonomous regions were invaded or bribed into some form of union. In many of these unions rules were harmonized to varying extents and sovereignty was ceded. Common currencies were also adopted in some of the unions. Consider the nation state that you hold the sovereignty of so high. Imagine tomorrow it was split into two. Both of these regions have the same currency and many common rules and regulations. Given that it's highly probable that your country has fully embraced capitalism and derives much of its wealth through trade, it has a choice: change things or not. If you don't change anything you haven't really regained sovereignty. If you change things you're imposing barriers to trade. Given you had a common currency and rules before, there's a good chance that they were your preferred trading partner if the infrastructure was good enough. Interestingly, there are regions where intra-state infrastructure is better than inter-state infrastructure, usually due to geography. But we can go deeper than that. We can keep subdividing from regions into cities into towns into households into individual people. Every time you go to the ballot box you acknowledge that you have ceded individual sovereignty. All the evidence I've seen points to the sovereignty argument in Brexit wasn't about sovereignty being ceded, but who it was perceived as being ceded to. Because if the vision of the Brexit-supporting International Trade and Development Secretary is to be taken as the post-brexit plan, then Brexit will be all about ceding more sovereignty for less trade.

repolfx 8y ago
All the evidence I've seen points to the sovereignty argument in Brexit wasn't about sovereignty being ceded, but who it was perceived as being ceded to They're impossible to disentangle. Voters in the UK had for years been telling politicians, here's our priorities, here's what is upsetting us. Mostly, massive immigration that overloaded public services. In response they were told, sorry, we can't do anything about that, France and Germany won't let us. It's out of the question, even trying to talk about it is pointless. Oh yeah, and you're probably a racist for even asking. Voters don't like being told to shut up because some foreign politician disagrees. Is that dislike a desire for "more sovereignty" or is it a problem with who power has been delegated to? Arguably if the UK had entered an EU-like arrangement with the USA instead, and become the 51st state, voters would have faced very similar concerns over things like gun control instead of immigration. Ultimately technological progress does allow us to satisfactorily decentralise power in new ways. Some people want society to go in the opposite direction and centralise it as much as possible. This is a bad idea, and the Eurozone predicament is an interesting example of why.
- dpwm 8y ago
  > They're impossible to disentangle. Well, it's made easier when you get people naming names of who the sovereignty is being ceded to. It's one thing to say "loss of sovereignty" and another to then go on to talk about who it's being ceded to. It's often not even correct. > Mostly, massive immigration that overloaded public services. Except it was per-capita underfunding that caused public services to be underfunded. Almost every study done on this found that EU migrants were on above-average wages and hence paying more tax. And if there weren't, there were measures that could have been implemented such as asking people under free movement rules to demonstrate their ability to support themselves and not be a burden to the state. Other EU states do this. Most public services should decrease in cost per person as it scales up. If it's super-linear there's something seriously wrong with the way you deliver public services. So it was the underfunding per-capita of public services that was the problem. Instead of expanding public services, the coalition government cut them drastically whilst outsourcing everything they could. > In response they were told, sorry, we can't do anything about that, France and Germany won't let us. It's out of the question, even trying to talk about it is pointless. Oh yeah, and you're probably a racist for even asking. We heard a lot that it "was not racist to be concerned about immigration." And a good proportion of people who agreed with that were in fact racist. Let's be honest, a lot of people in this country are prejudiced against people based on their ethnicity, which is pretty much textbook racist. I've even heard on the doorstep that "it's alright to hate polish people because they're white." Attitudes like "they shouldn't be here" are quite common and seem to be more openly voiced after the referendum. It's certainly ignorant of history if you believe that immigration is a recent thing as many who espouse these attitudes seem to do. Go back a few of hundred years and you wouldn't have known if somebody was from the North or France. Both would be just as incomprehensible. > Ultimately technological progress does allow us to satisfactorily decentralise power in new ways. Some people want society to go in the opposite direction and centralise it as much as possible. This is a bad idea, and the Eurozone predicament is an interesting example of why. The Eurozone predicament is complicated. There are merits and demerits to centralisation. We should all be wary of extrapolating problems with one large system to all large systems.
  - repolfx 8y ago

by dpwm 8y ago

repolfx 8y ago

All the evidence I've seen points to the sovereignty argument in Brexit wasn't about sovereignty being ceded, but who it was perceived as being ceded to They're impossible to disentangle. Voters in the UK had for years been telling politicians, here's our priorities, here's what is upsetting us. Mostly, massive immigration that overloaded public services. In response they were told, sorry, we can't do anything about that, France and Germany won't let us. It's out of the question, even trying to talk about it is pointless. Oh yeah, and you're probably a racist for even asking. Voters don't like being told to shut up because some foreign politician disagrees. Is that dislike a desire for "more sovereignty" or is it a problem with who power has been delegated to? Arguably if the UK had entered an EU-like arrangement with the USA instead, and become the 51st state, voters would have faced very similar concerns over things like gun control instead of immigration. Ultimately technological progress does allow us to satisfactorily decentralise power in new ways. Some people want society to go in the opposite direction and centralise it as much as possible. This is a bad idea, and the Eurozone predicament is an interesting example of why.

dpwm 8y ago
> They're impossible to disentangle. Well, it's made easier when you get people naming names of who the sovereignty is being ceded to. It's one thing to say "loss of sovereignty" and another to then go on to talk about who it's being ceded to. It's often not even correct. > Mostly, massive immigration that overloaded public services. Except it was per-capita underfunding that caused public services to be underfunded. Almost every study done on this found that EU migrants were on above-average wages and hence paying more tax. And if there weren't, there were measures that could have been implemented such as asking people under free movement rules to demonstrate their ability to support themselves and not be a burden to the state. Other EU states do this. Most public services should decrease in cost per person as it scales up. If it's super-linear there's something seriously wrong with the way you deliver public services. So it was the underfunding per-capita of public services that was the problem. Instead of expanding public services, the coalition government cut them drastically whilst outsourcing everything they could. > In response they were told, sorry, we can't do anything about that, France and Germany won't let us. It's out of the question, even trying to talk about it is pointless. Oh yeah, and you're probably a racist for even asking. We heard a lot that it "was not racist to be concerned about immigration." And a good proportion of people who agreed with that were in fact racist. Let's be honest, a lot of people in this country are prejudiced against people based on their ethnicity, which is pretty much textbook racist. I've even heard on the doorstep that "it's alright to hate polish people because they're white." Attitudes like "they shouldn't be here" are quite common and seem to be more openly voiced after the referendum. It's certainly ignorant of history if you believe that immigration is a recent thing as many who espouse these attitudes seem to do. Go back a few of hundred years and you wouldn't have known if somebody was from the North or France. Both would be just as incomprehensible. > Ultimately technological progress does allow us to satisfactorily decentralise power in new ways. Some people want society to go in the opposite direction and centralise it as much as possible. This is a bad idea, and the Eurozone predicament is an interesting example of why. The Eurozone predicament is complicated. There are merits and demerits to centralisation. We should all be wary of extrapolating problems with one large system to all large systems.
- repolfx 8y ago