What the EU is and what the EU referendum isn’t
It’s not that Britain, in particular, shouldn’t be a member of the EU. It is that no nation should be a member. It’s that the EU shouldn’t exist at all because it isn’t a legitimate social institution.
The EU acquires its funding through coercive, non contractual means (taxation by governments) and uses coercion against innocent people (via the coercive apparatuses of member states) in attempts to achieve its ends. Which are often economically impossible or else morally absurd.
The use of coercive means puts the EU in the same ethical class as private criminal organisations, such as the mafia. But the evil of the mafia isn’t able to continuously expand its influence over society because good, in the form of enforcement of just laws against theft and violence, is constantly pushing back against it.
The same cannot be said of the EU, however. It uses coercion unabated. It meets almost no resistance in expanding its powers because doing so often serves the immediate interests of politicians across Europe.
Legal evils like taxation, state communism/socialism and interventionism (the EU), do far more harm to peace and prosperity than any illegal evil could do. The Nazi holocaust is probably the most horrific example of legal evil in living memory, but there’s plenty more from the 20th century alone. If the EU was meant to prevent such horrors from happening again, then it was never going to work. Legal evil cannot be the solution to legal evil.
Let’s face it, Britain’s membership of the EU doesn’t really matter. To paraphrase Mark Twain, if it did, then Britain’s ruling elite wouldn’t be letting the public decide if Britain remains in the EU or not. The current government has publicly declared its preference for Britain to remain, but that’s probably because it believes this aligns with the majority view.
Ultimately, there’s no freedoms or amount of wealth that the EU can take from us that our own government cannot. Both are coercive agencies with the power to make and enforce all kinds of legislative laws; and the power to grant themselves legal permission to control your life in numerous way.
My guess is that the current government sees the EU referendum as an opportunity to win more of the public’s favour and boost its chances of winning the next election. Politicians only ever think as far as the next election. There’s little incentive to think any further. And people like referendums because it makes them feel important and like they have much greater influence than they really do.
It’s really only a matter of time until the potential power of nation-states and the EU super-state is fully utilised by suitably sociopathic politicians across Europe; by men who will do anything and sacrifice anyone in the delusional pursuit of national glory and European unity. Because Europe’s economic stagnation and immigration crisis are almost certainly going to get much worse before they get better.
Governments will gobble up increasingly more in overt and stealth taxes in the coming decades, leaving productive people with increasingly less, and they will further restrict their freedom of speech and movement in the name of keeping them safe from terrorism. And we will have come full circle in a cycle of statist violence that Europe’s intellectual and political classes believed the EU would break forever.
The Remain campaign has claimed that leaving the EU would hurt the UK economy, but the reality is that severe economic hardship is already coming our way regardless of whether Britain’s in or out of the EU. Because time is ticking on the national debt. There’s no escaping it. One day the UK government will have run out of time to pay back everyone it promised to pay everything it promised to pay them.
When that time comes, vast sums of money will be wiped off the balance sheets of the UK’s banks because the debt is far too large to be paid back, even in several lifetimes. The government will default on all or some of its debt. Some banks will go under as a result and the UK’s economy will certainly be thrown into turmoil. Everyone’s standard of living will be hit hard, harder than we’ve experienced since the 2008 credit crunch.
Not least by the raiding of our bank accounts through various forms of government sponsored theft (the most common way governments solve debt crises). So the Remain campaign’s economic arguments don’t carry anything like the weight they believe them to.
Leaving the EU could have short-term negative effects on the economy, but those will become insignificant once the state defaults on its debts and the shock waves of that spread through society.
There’s a Doobie Brothers song that has the line “what seems to be is always better than nothing”. There is wisdom in these words. What the EU seems to be to its advocates is always going to be better than what they perceive the only alternative to be — nothing — i.e. no free movement of people, goods and capital across Europe. But that isn’t what would be if the EU didn’t exist.
It is a false choice because we don’t get these freedoms from having more government. Government is the opposite of freedom. It is the use of force — that’s the point of government. The ‘freedom’ that the EU produces isn’t actual freedom. In reality it is just a certain level of government control over the movement of and economic activity of all people, and sometimes certain groups of people, agreed upon by Europe’s ruling elite. A level that benefits some and harms others. A level that is set according to the preferences of men in power in the EU, their cronies and the special interest groups that lobby them.
Real freedom is zero government control over and interference into the movement of peaceful people and their peaceful, voluntary economic exchanges. Increasingly intrusive national governments are already a large enough obstacle to achieving the freedom that is rightfully every man’s and which maximizes wealth creation. The continued existence of supranational political institutions like the EU, whose incumbents are far removed and much less accountable to the half a billion people they rule over, only makes progress even harder.
Perhaps people are scared that abolishing the EU means abandoning the ideals of free movement of people, goods and capital and a single European market. But in doesn’t. On the contrary, it means further embracing these ideals.
Perhaps the only sensible and dignified answer we can give to our rulers on the EU question is silence. How else are we to answer when asked which group of central planners we want to be the test subjects of? We are not their lab rats. Our money is not theirs to take. Our lives are not theirs to be experimented on.
We do not need their grand plans and they have no right to force us to live according to them. The grand plans of men in state power cannot produce peace and prosperity but only destroy it.
