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> It wasn't politically correct to vote Brexit, so nobody mentioned it and just voted. I'm sure this is part of what I experienced, but we asked a lot of peopl

> It wasn't politically correct to vote Brexit, so nobody mentioned it and just voted. I'm sure this is part of what I experienced, but we asked a lot of people and there wasn't much noncommittal "not sures" or anything. It was a lot of flat "no ways." > I'd take a business / economic hit over having a political end economic entity rule my country, especially one which contains countries that are ticking bombs with no hope to recover. I've heard this line of reasoning before, and it's never quite made sense to me. The EU is an enormous area populated mostly with economies that are doing relatively fine. They're not all going to be fine all the time. Britain hasn't always been economically super healthy - the 1970s, when it joined the EU, were a pretty poor period in its economic history - and it still got the benefit of being in the EU. I don't want my state to secede from the Union because other states elsewhere have problems I don't have (though obviously plenty of people have felt that way throughout history). It just feels like a lot of "I help mine and only mine" over "we all help each other," where "mine" means "people who are in the same geographical region as me, roughly speaking, with some exceptions." Who we decide to care about or not all feels really arbitrary, just as borders between countries are pretty arbitrary. I'm not saying you personally are selfish, or that British people are selfish, but it does feel like a deeply self-serving and frankly misguided impulse. Britain and so much of the world are as peaceful and prosperous as they are today is because of a safe, peaceful global environment based on mutual assistance. (That's not to say things haven't gotten worse in the last ~10 years - just that for as bad as things are in this downturn now, they were so much worse in the not-too-distant past.)

jokethrowaway 6y ago
I really appreciate your answer! I think it's easy to frame this as a "selfishness" issue - and I'm sure a lot of people who voted for Brexit just wanted to get rid of immigrants. That's not my case, as I'm an immigrant myself (and son of immigrants in my mother country). I think we shouldn't have centralised form of governments because the more you move the problem away and try to generalise it, the more you end up with solutions that upset a minority of your consumers. If we take a democratically elected government that follow through with their promises, you're not upsetting a majority of your consumers, but you will likely upset a minority. On top of this, by centralising problem solving, you create a machine that has an excuse to be fed with everyone's money. And you can be sure a percentage of that, will be spent just on the inefficiency of the machine, which derives from not having competition and market forces driving down the price. The best solution to make everyone happy is then to have a society where any combination of rules is possible. People can naturally cluster based on the rules they like and make some compromises based on that. I don't think we should have anyone imposing laws or taxing someone else. We can get by with services provided by private companies. Private Health Care, private Protection Services, private Courts, private contracts between individuals. Voluntarily provided donations to aid those who have no money. If you put my anarcho-capitalist society on one extreme and the Soviet Union on the other, you can see that having a government per country is somewhere in the middle - and, IMHO, it's bad enough; having a single Union for several countries where the rules are all the same and decided by democracy, means moving more towards the Soviet Union model, where even more people are unhappy. If the problem is having import taxes and bureaucracy between countries, just get rid of them, you don't need to shift power far away to solve that. If the problem is that moving across countries is too complicated, just get rid of restriction, you don't need to shift power far away to solve that. I'm not happy with the world we have, and I know many people who believe in the European project are not happy as well. Still, I think the solution is LESS government, not MORE.
- ivraatiems 6y ago
  Have you ever read The Dispossessed? Inevitably, I think, your anarchist society would end up being a society with a government - just not the same government as we currently have. Maybe the power would be more hidden, or less responsible to the people, but there would still be a government managing it. That's not to say it wouldn't be better in some ways - but people have to coordinate in order to solve large problems, and that's what governments do. In an ideal version of your system, everything is great. In an ideal version of my system, everything is great. Comparing your ideally functioning system to the Soviet Union is like comparing a perfectly ripe apple to a decaying, moldy orange from 20 years ago. Likewise, the EU is an imperfect example of the thing it is trying to be, but it is still better than the things that preceded it. The pains of Brexit we are seeing now are not "growing pains" or "adjustment pains", IMO - they are the pains of moving from a better way of doing things (which had its own sets of downsides) back to what a worse way of doing things, where "better" and "worse" mean "more efficient at helping people get what they need and do what they want" and "less efficient and helping people with those same things". The likely reality is that if a system is populated by people incentivized to behave badly, it will suck to exist in for a lot of people, probably most. A good system is one populated mostly by people incentivized to act well. The incentive could come in many forms - cultural expectations, religious teachings, economic incentives, and so on. You could definitely establish an allegedly anarchist society that had the right cultural and societal incentives to be stable - if you could set up those incentives first. Ditto with a communist society. The problem is not what we call the organizations responsible for managing cooperation between people at scale, it's how we train humanity to interact with and consider them. Therefore, the right system to pick is whichever one we can achieve that is most likely to be an improvement on the one we have given the current set of incentives - and right now, given the scale of the problems facing global society, I think a more globalized, less isolated, more open system is the one to choose. Brexit is a step back, to me, because it moves us more towards systems that will not work for the challenges we face, no matter what we call them or how we culturally couch them, because it disincentivizes people from caring about others at the scale necessary to solve problems common to both.
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago

jokethrowaway 6y ago

I really appreciate your answer! I think it's easy to frame this as a "selfishness" issue - and I'm sure a lot of people who voted for Brexit just wanted to get rid of immigrants. That's not my case, as I'm an immigrant myself (and son of immigrants in my mother country). I think we shouldn't have centralised form of governments because the more you move the problem away and try to generalise it, the more you end up with solutions that upset a minority of your consumers. If we take a democratically elected government that follow through with their promises, you're not upsetting a majority of your consumers, but you will likely upset a minority. On top of this, by centralising problem solving, you create a machine that has an excuse to be fed with everyone's money. And you can be sure a percentage of that, will be spent just on the inefficiency of the machine, which derives from not having competition and market forces driving down the price. The best solution to make everyone happy is then to have a society where any combination of rules is possible. People can naturally cluster based on the rules they like and make some compromises based on that. I don't think we should have anyone imposing laws or taxing someone else. We can get by with services provided by private companies. Private Health Care, private Protection Services, private Courts, private contracts between individuals. Voluntarily provided donations to aid those who have no money. If you put my anarcho-capitalist society on one extreme and the Soviet Union on the other, you can see that having a government per country is somewhere in the middle - and, IMHO, it's bad enough; having a single Union for several countries where the rules are all the same and decided by democracy, means moving more towards the Soviet Union model, where even more people are unhappy. If the problem is having import taxes and bureaucracy between countries, just get rid of them, you don't need to shift power far away to solve that. If the problem is that moving across countries is too complicated, just get rid of restriction, you don't need to shift power far away to solve that. I'm not happy with the world we have, and I know many people who believe in the European project are not happy as well. Still, I think the solution is LESS government, not MORE.

ivraatiems 6y ago
Have you ever read The Dispossessed? Inevitably, I think, your anarchist society would end up being a society with a government - just not the same government as we currently have. Maybe the power would be more hidden, or less responsible to the people, but there would still be a government managing it. That's not to say it wouldn't be better in some ways - but people have to coordinate in order to solve large problems, and that's what governments do. In an ideal version of your system, everything is great. In an ideal version of my system, everything is great. Comparing your ideally functioning system to the Soviet Union is like comparing a perfectly ripe apple to a decaying, moldy orange from 20 years ago. Likewise, the EU is an imperfect example of the thing it is trying to be, but it is still better than the things that preceded it. The pains of Brexit we are seeing now are not "growing pains" or "adjustment pains", IMO - they are the pains of moving from a better way of doing things (which had its own sets of downsides) back to what a worse way of doing things, where "better" and "worse" mean "more efficient at helping people get what they need and do what they want" and "less efficient and helping people with those same things". The likely reality is that if a system is populated by people incentivized to behave badly, it will suck to exist in for a lot of people, probably most. A good system is one populated mostly by people incentivized to act well. The incentive could come in many forms - cultural expectations, religious teachings, economic incentives, and so on. You could definitely establish an allegedly anarchist society that had the right cultural and societal incentives to be stable - if you could set up those incentives first. Ditto with a communist society. The problem is not what we call the organizations responsible for managing cooperation between people at scale, it's how we train humanity to interact with and consider them. Therefore, the right system to pick is whichever one we can achieve that is most likely to be an improvement on the one we have given the current set of incentives - and right now, given the scale of the problems facing global society, I think a more globalized, less isolated, more open system is the one to choose. Brexit is a step back, to me, because it moves us more towards systems that will not work for the challenges we face, no matter what we call them or how we culturally couch them, because it disincentivizes people from caring about others at the scale necessary to solve problems common to both.
- jokethrowaway 6y ago