5 ms·

The E.U. would have worked better, if it stayed a free trade union. The pursuit of turning it into a super state evolved the EU into a bureaucratic mess.

smitty1e 7y ago
The Tower of Babel is among the oldest project management case studies in human history, and seems to enjoy frequent repetition. People don't scale, no matter what the "homo bureaucratus" minority might wish.
mc32 7y ago
-They started with a common market --which is good. -Then they added a hamstrung common currency (but nations were fiscally independent). -And finally they're looking to have a super-government atop national governments. I think this one is the main thing which irks people. That said, I think a common currency with independent fiscal policies and budgets is largely unworkable. Why is Spain or Greece stuck with the same monetary policy as Germany?
- aries1980 7y ago
  > I think this one is the main thing which irks people. Indeed. France and The Netherlands rejected the Treaty of Lisbon in referendum, yet 2 years later, the Treaty was signed. The UK didn't dare to hold a referendum.
dane-pgp 7y ago
The U.S. would have worked better, it if stayed a confederacy. The pursuit of turning it into a super state evolved the US into a bureaucratic mess.
- mc32 7y ago
  We’ve had over 200 years to work things out —slowly. It was pretty much a diaspora of the same mindset throughout with a common language and body of law. Two hundred or a hundred years ago people put up with a lot. A modern world doesn’t want to wait for things to work themselves out.
  - naravara 7y ago
    >We’ve had over 200 years to work things out slowly. It was pretty much a diaspora of the same mindset throughout with a common language. Not really. Big parts of Pennsylvania and New York we’re speaking Dutch. A lot of the South was speaking Spanish. A bunch of the hinterland was Francophone. And that’s just the White people.
    - mc32 7y ago
      So you’re saying the EU should be like an XVIII century formational country like the US or even Russia or China or Japan and homogenize? Maybe let’s start with the French dropping French and let’s have Russia give up some land for eastward expansion. Once you prove your success there, Africa awaits for unification efforts too.
      - happymellon 7y ago
        You say that like you jest, but with the UK out the chances of having a common language have improved.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Two hundred years ago, the federal government was tiny and most decisions were made locally. That changed dramatically in the last two generations.
    - mc32 7y ago
      Absolutely but it’s been a very slow creep. Not a sudden imposition.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      A "generation" in scientific terms is roughly 25 years, right? In 1969, you couldn't drive a truck full of oranges between cities in two different states without permission from a federal agency, if I understand the history here correctly.
- rayiner 7y ago
  I don’t know if you’ve looked around, but US political tensions have reached the point where people routinely deny that our President is our legitimate elected leader and a quarter of Americans support secession: https://mises.org/power-market/reuters-poll-shows-hispanics-support-secession-more-general-population https://mises.org/power-market/reuters-poll-shows-hispanics-.... (Fun fact: the percentage of people supporting secession is about the same as the percentage of white people who identify in polls as “liberal” rather than “moderate” or “conservative.”) It’s possible for states to get too big and peoples’ values to get too divergent for the political system to function efficiently. The US has been stuck in that state for a couple of decades. Until Brexit, the EU was hurtling headline into the same problem.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    I don't know if you noticed, but people in the US have been doing that since 1993. It doesn't feel that long ago to me either, but I have to admit, at a quarter century, you have to stop calling it a recent trend.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      I agree Clinton is when the wheels came off, and beating the other side into submission became more important than governing. I’d call that pretty recent in the grand scheme of things. (I’d add that I don’t think the trend is necessarily blameworthy. It’s hard to compromise politically with people who sincerely believe are morally wrong. And that’s true of many of the issues that divide the US today. But whether it is justified or not, you can’t have a functioning democracy where half the people view the other half as “the other.” Trump isn’t the end of this problem, he’s the start of it.
      - tptacek 7y ago
        Read Perlstein's books on the emergence of the modern GOP, not for the narrative about the ideological sort and the commandeering of the GOP, but for all the little details about how fucked things were in the '60s and '70s. If you go another 25 years back in time, you're in a period where strikes were being broken with private military forces. 25 years further back and you've got what can only be called small-scale civil wars sparked by labor conflicts. Plus ça change. Nobody knows whether our system is going to work in the long run. Aren't we one of the oldest constitutional republics in the world? And yet we're like the blink of an eye compared to the empires of antiquity. It could all collapse tomorrow or we could chug along like Rome for centuries to come. But I'm not here for arguments that we're somehow uniquely screwed up today. Things have gotten less regulated and more decentralized, and other things have gone the opposite direction. Some people are angrier, others happier (we have a distinctively bad President so we're probably a little unusually hyped up). But if you wanted to be an American at a time of national stability, 2019 would still probably be in the top quartile of years to be here. Either way, YC should not be pitching "Government 2.0".
- 1123581321 7y ago
  Beyond using an asinine parody format, this isn’t instructive as the United States was formed from former sovereign holdings and was arguably forced by two major wars (1812 and 1861) to increase its federal power. The EU was formed by sovereign nations, many with long history, in a prosperous time and not in response to existential threats. Unlike the United States, the EU beyond providing a trade zone does not give its members new tools to solve problems as the members already had unlimited power to enact their own policy.
  - dane-pgp 7y ago
    > ... was arguably forced by two major wars... You may want to read more about the impetus behind the formation of the EU, in particular its origins in the European Coal and Steel Community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Commun...
    - 1123581321 7y ago
      Thank you; that link further corroborates that the EU has its origins in (the re-emergence of) peace-time prosperity and between fully capable nations. There was no risk of a war between Germany and France when the ECSC was proposed.
      - pintxo 7y ago
        There might have been no imminent risk of war been present at the very beginning of what we call today the EU. But the history of repeated wars in Europe is surely one of the largest drivers behind all of it [1]. The ECSC was founded in 1951 [2], that is just 6 years after the end of WW2! > Determined to prevent another such terrible war, European governments concluded that pooling coal and steel production would – in the words of the Declaration – make war between historic rivals France and Germany "not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible". [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Europaea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Europaea [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Commun... [3] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/symbols/europe-day/schuman-declaration_en https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/symbols/europe-day...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Simulacra 7y ago
I'm still waiting to see if all of this is for naught, and the UK already left the Union.

smitty1e 7y ago

The Tower of Babel is among the oldest project management case studies in human history, and seems to enjoy frequent repetition. People don't scale, no matter what the "homo bureaucratus" minority might wish.

mc32 7y ago

-They started with a common market --which is good. -Then they added a hamstrung common currency (but nations were fiscally independent). -And finally they're looking to have a super-government atop national governments. I think this one is the main thing which irks people. That said, I think a common currency with independent fiscal policies and budgets is largely unworkable. Why is Spain or Greece stuck with the same monetary policy as Germany?

aries1980 7y ago
> I think this one is the main thing which irks people. Indeed. France and The Netherlands rejected the Treaty of Lisbon in referendum, yet 2 years later, the Treaty was signed. The UK didn't dare to hold a referendum.

dane-pgp 7y ago

The U.S. would have worked better, it if stayed a confederacy. The pursuit of turning it into a super state evolved the US into a bureaucratic mess.

mc32 7y ago
We’ve had over 200 years to work things out —slowly. It was pretty much a diaspora of the same mindset throughout with a common language and body of law. Two hundred or a hundred years ago people put up with a lot. A modern world doesn’t want to wait for things to work themselves out.
- naravara 7y ago
  >We’ve had over 200 years to work things out slowly. It was pretty much a diaspora of the same mindset throughout with a common language. Not really. Big parts of Pennsylvania and New York we’re speaking Dutch. A lot of the South was speaking Spanish. A bunch of the hinterland was Francophone. And that’s just the White people.
  - mc32 7y ago
    So you’re saying the EU should be like an XVIII century formational country like the US or even Russia or China or Japan and homogenize? Maybe let’s start with the French dropping French and let’s have Russia give up some land for eastward expansion. Once you prove your success there, Africa awaits for unification efforts too.
    - happymellon 7y ago
      You say that like you jest, but with the UK out the chances of having a common language have improved.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Two hundred years ago, the federal government was tiny and most decisions were made locally. That changed dramatically in the last two generations.
  - mc32 7y ago
    Absolutely but it’s been a very slow creep. Not a sudden imposition.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    A "generation" in scientific terms is roughly 25 years, right? In 1969, you couldn't drive a truck full of oranges between cities in two different states without permission from a federal agency, if I understand the history here correctly.
rayiner 7y ago
I don’t know if you’ve looked around, but US political tensions have reached the point where people routinely deny that our President is our legitimate elected leader and a quarter of Americans support secession: https://mises.org/power-market/reuters-poll-shows-hispanics-support-secession-more-general-population https://mises.org/power-market/reuters-poll-shows-hispanics-.... (Fun fact: the percentage of people supporting secession is about the same as the percentage of white people who identify in polls as “liberal” rather than “moderate” or “conservative.”) It’s possible for states to get too big and peoples’ values to get too divergent for the political system to function efficiently. The US has been stuck in that state for a couple of decades. Until Brexit, the EU was hurtling headline into the same problem.
- tptacek 7y ago
  I don't know if you noticed, but people in the US have been doing that since 1993. It doesn't feel that long ago to me either, but I have to admit, at a quarter century, you have to stop calling it a recent trend.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    I agree Clinton is when the wheels came off, and beating the other side into submission became more important than governing. I’d call that pretty recent in the grand scheme of things. (I’d add that I don’t think the trend is necessarily blameworthy. It’s hard to compromise politically with people who sincerely believe are morally wrong. And that’s true of many of the issues that divide the US today. But whether it is justified or not, you can’t have a functioning democracy where half the people view the other half as “the other.” Trump isn’t the end of this problem, he’s the start of it.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      Read Perlstein's books on the emergence of the modern GOP, not for the narrative about the ideological sort and the commandeering of the GOP, but for all the little details about how fucked things were in the '60s and '70s. If you go another 25 years back in time, you're in a period where strikes were being broken with private military forces. 25 years further back and you've got what can only be called small-scale civil wars sparked by labor conflicts. Plus ça change. Nobody knows whether our system is going to work in the long run. Aren't we one of the oldest constitutional republics in the world? And yet we're like the blink of an eye compared to the empires of antiquity. It could all collapse tomorrow or we could chug along like Rome for centuries to come. But I'm not here for arguments that we're somehow uniquely screwed up today. Things have gotten less regulated and more decentralized, and other things have gone the opposite direction. Some people are angrier, others happier (we have a distinctively bad President so we're probably a little unusually hyped up). But if you wanted to be an American at a time of national stability, 2019 would still probably be in the top quartile of years to be here. Either way, YC should not be pitching "Government 2.0".
1123581321 7y ago
Beyond using an asinine parody format, this isn’t instructive as the United States was formed from former sovereign holdings and was arguably forced by two major wars (1812 and 1861) to increase its federal power. The EU was formed by sovereign nations, many with long history, in a prosperous time and not in response to existential threats. Unlike the United States, the EU beyond providing a trade zone does not give its members new tools to solve problems as the members already had unlimited power to enact their own policy.
- dane-pgp 7y ago
  > ... was arguably forced by two major wars... You may want to read more about the impetus behind the formation of the EU, in particular its origins in the European Coal and Steel Community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Commun...
  - 1123581321 7y ago
    Thank you; that link further corroborates that the EU has its origins in (the re-emergence of) peace-time prosperity and between fully capable nations. There was no risk of a war between Germany and France when the ECSC was proposed.
    - pintxo 7y ago
      There might have been no imminent risk of war been present at the very beginning of what we call today the EU. But the history of repeated wars in Europe is surely one of the largest drivers behind all of it [1]. The ECSC was founded in 1951 [2], that is just 6 years after the end of WW2! > Determined to prevent another such terrible war, European governments concluded that pooling coal and steel production would – in the words of the Declaration – make war between historic rivals France and Germany "not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible". [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Europaea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Europaea [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Commun... [3] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/symbols/europe-day/schuman-declaration_en https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/symbols/europe-day...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Simulacra 7y ago

I'm still waiting to see if all of this is for naught, and the UK already left the Union.