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> Bear in mind, it justifies the very steep membership fees (for the countries that have high enough GDP to pay) by tying membership to free trade. The EU keeps

• aredox 2y ago
  Even the "bad countries" like Greece have bought a lot of German stuff: cars, weapons... https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/athen/20974.pdf https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/athen/20974.pdf
• mike_hearn 2y ago
  I don't think you can say the benefits the rich members get are their fees being sent to poor members. That's not a benefit to the people who live in the rich countries, that's a price levied on membership. Which is why the last time the EU was seriously debated at a national level (Brexit) nobody attempted to defend the membership fees as anything other than a purely transactional arrangement. You certainly can't claim that immigration is a membership benefit because a country can set its visa policy to attract however many migrants it wants if it's outside the EU, but not if it's inside. I'm not sure what relevance your link has to what I said, by the way. The Mercosur agreement only happened because the EU was able to keep agricultural tariffs in place: https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-country-and-region/countries-and-regions/mercosur/eu-mercosur-agreement/factsheet-eu-mercosur-partnership-agreement-opening-opportunities-european-farmers_en https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou... > For sensitive products like beef, poultry or sugar, in particular, access to the EU market will be permanently limited through gradually implemented quotas. The EU will grant very limited access to its market to imports of agri-food products. Moreover, a bilateral safeguard clause can be applied in case increased imports from Mercosur cause - or even only threaten to cause - serious injury to the relevant EU sectors. For the first time, this safeguard clause also covers imports under tariff rate quotas. The agreement does not give duty-free access to Mercosur beef. It will allow 99,000 tonnes of Mercosur beef to enter the EU market with a 7.5% duty. 55% of the quota will consist of fresh or chilled meat and 45% of lower-value frozen meat.
  • ben_w 2y ago
    > I don't think you can say the benefits the rich members get are their fees being sent to poor members. That's not a benefit to the people who live in the rich countries, that's a price levied on membership. Which is why the last time the EU was seriously debated at a national level (Brexit) nobody attempted to defend the membership fees as anything other than a purely transactional arrangement. You certainly can't claim that immigration is a membership benefit because a country can set its visa policy to attract however many migrants it wants if it's outside the EU, but not if it's inside. The way you phrase this suggests you're considering it from the wrong perspective. What you're arguing against doesn't even seem to be present in my reading of the comment you're replying to. The membership benefit isn't the fees, any more than your Amazon Prime (etc.) membership's benefit is the fee. The benefit of the fee to rich countries (i.e. net spenders) is that these other countries, the ones that you're sending money to, are going to align their laws with yours, have a cheap workforce willing to to supply you with labour at a lower cost than your own citizens would otherwise, and that they are now a stable destination for any investment opportunities with your own capital precisely because they're getting integrated with your own economy and law. Specifically this: > nobody attempted to defend the membership fees as anything other than a purely transactional arrangement. We did. You may not have heard it, but we did. > You certainly can't claim that immigration is a membership benefit because a country can set its visa policy to attract however many migrants it wants if it's outside the EU, but not if it's inside. Incorrect. Closest you get is that there's a scheme called the "Blue Card" (modelled after the US green card), that applies to everyone except Ireland and Denmark (and before Brexit, the UK): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_(European_Union) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_(European_Union) But each member state gets to set quotas on how many Blue Cards they accept, and can also open up rules for other routes into their countries.
    • mike_hearn 2y ago
      The comment I replied to said this: > The EU justifies the high membership fees for the rich members by the benefits those rich members get - the poorer EU countries get invested in Which is just another way of saying "the benefit of paying the fees is that someone else gets them". That's not a benefit and membership fees aren't investments (you don't own anything as a result of paying them). Same for the rest of this thread. Other countries can align their laws without being given money, and should if those laws are better than their own. It's not a "benefit" to be paying them to fix their own legal systems. Cheap immigrant labour isn't a benefit to the workers in the country, minimum wage laws still apply anyway so the benefits even to rich people are limited, and you don't have to pay foreign countries to attract immigrants from them. They come regardless of what money their government is receiving. In fact big transfer payments make it less likely that they will want to migrate, not more. Finally, countries generally try to be stable locations for investment regardless of EU membership or receiving transfer payments. > We did. You may not have heard it, but we did. I don't think anyone did. If they did, then this thread doesn't reflect well on what they must have been saying because not a single argument in it for why fees are a "benefit" make any sense. It's common sense that fees are never a benefit, which is why free trade zones don't normally charge for membership. In fact AFAIK only the EU does that and that's because it's primarily an ideological project that needs huge sums of money for its other goals: free trade is just a carrot-cum-stick used to get countries to go along with it. > Incorrect. Closest you get is that there's a scheme called the "Blue Card" The Blue Card is an EU-level scheme with rules set by the Commission, and it only applies to people with "higher professional qualifications" and whose salary is higher than average. Obviously, nobody needs to pay billions in membership fees for the privilege of having random visa scheme imposed on them, any country that wants to can set up such a scheme itself. It's even named after a non-EU document. There is no immigration benefit to being an EU member. If you want to attract lots of migrants from poor EU countries, you can do that easily outside as well.