I don’t know if this has been discussed here yet, but I want to find out how people think of the EU.
Of course, on the one hand, it has to be diametrically opposed to the principles of libertarianism. It’s big government, and huge bureaucracy.
On the other hand, people, goods, and capital are able to easily move around the entire union. Wasn’t it true that before the EU, most the countries in Europe had some pretty high import/export regulations? Isn’t the EU a good thing in this respect?
I suppose the real question of this post is this: If the goal of libertarianism is to decentralize as much as possible, how do you overcome the (very likely) possibility that other countries behave in incredibly protectionist ways, making trade highly difficult?
The EU is evil. It is a totally socialist organisation through and through. The whole EU project is almost identical to the document Europaische Wirtshaft Gemainschaft which was headed up by Dr Funk who was head of the Reichsbank in Nazi Germany. The alleged free movement of people and capital is firstly heavily regulated even within the union and the movement of labour amounts to forced integration to undermine individual cultures and customs to create a new European man. On forced intergartion see Hoppe’s Natural Order, the State and the Immigration Problem.
If countries are protectionist they merely hurt themselves. Other countries who adopt unilateral free trade will do better and will further increase the pressure for free trade in those countries. You should never abandon your principles for some short term gain; for in the long term you shall surely lose.
The aim is not so much decentralization as elimination of centralized power. While the EU appears to be an even bigger, more centralized power than the individual European states, it offers something of a competing jurisdiction, and has thus largely reduced the power of the member states.
Those who oppose it the loudest have been the nationalists, exactly the kind of people who would be most dangerous with centralized power. Overall the EU has contributed to a large-scale denationalization of Europe, while not being more socialist than the member states were before. That is why it has a reputation for being a liberal institution.
Every time when someone starts to speak of protectionism and the EU I can’t help thinking of the common agricultural policy in the union. In my opinion this just might be the biggest steppingstone for the development of the third world countries. The CAP is probably the biggest example of how the edge of specialization gets ignored. Of course this is also bad for EU itself. Also EU is not the only protecting its agriculture and thinking that one has to be able to survive on its own. As long as this doesn’t change there can be no free society. The fear of something, no matter it is, can’t be the reason for not trying for a better solution. If we started to consentrate on fears and risks we’d all end up living in caves protecting ourselves with sticks and stones. Or as said years ago: “To present the most arguments against the free market is the lack of belief in freedom itself.”
Although the EU has been denationalizing Europe it might very well be walking towards somekind of a new european man, as mentioned above. It seems that EU is constantly trying to become a country itself and this new man would be very useful in this case, even required. The new reform act again is taking power from member states but this also means that it is putting it in the hands of the union. Some time ago when I wasn’t a libertarian and familiar with austrian economics (no wonder since one doesn’t get to hear about them in public schools) I also believed that one centralized government is the best way to go. One ‘good emperor’ would be the cheapest way to run mankind. But as we know one of the worst things about a state is bureaucracy, which is self-expanding and thrives on the size of the state. And this is why EU has started to scare me.
For a while a also used to think that in order to get to a free society it might be a could idea to create one big state first and then abolish it. But this clearly is absurd since it would require enourmous violations of individual freedom and as a libertarian I can’t say that ‘the end justfies the means’.
I must agree with Physiocrat. I have little love for the EU. The funny thing is that I used to love it (although as I was a monarchist at the time I would’ve preferred for it to take a more monarchical structure.) The more I’ve come to see of it though, the more I dislike it.
I like the idea of the EU being a large free trade zone with unrestricted movement of labour and capital. But in practice, most member countries regulate and restrict both of these. Pretty much everything the EU gets up to I am against. I would like the whole EU to be scrapped and started again purely as a free trade zone.
Let’s see what happens when the time for keeping old restrictions (in order to ‘protect’ themselves from the new members) gets over, it should happen in a few years time. What I’m worried about is that when the market should get more free and therefore more prosperous, the politicians in Brussels would most probably hail it as their big effort. There would very likely be an interpretation that would say that without the good job and cooperation done by the governments there couldn’t be such success. The brainwash must continue!
For that purpose, no EU would have been necessary. You could simply construct a group of states who’d agree to abolish tariffs and capital restrictions for their subjects.Just let them do
The EUSSR is the most regulated economic zone in the world, I see it invade my life further from day to day. On December 13, the individual nations have ceased to exist, thanks to the new EU treaties which have been slipped under with almost no-one noticing their destructive impact. The days of a German constitution are history. What we have now is a set of treaties which have never been published or set to open discussion. A few thousand pages full of tripe and red tape, which have te effect of an “Enabling Act” for a hog-wild administration out of any control.
The decisions are being made by the EU commission, a group of Wesley Mouches (or worse), appointed by governments and not responsible to any authority. They can create laws, directives and executive orders at whim.
The EU parliament is a sick joke, it has no legislative power at all, never had.
THe EU constitution has been rejected in polls in Netherlands and France and ought to be dead as a doornail. Instead it was converted into a set of treaties which need only rattification by governments, not by anyone else.
It is like cancer, growing more and more aggressively and it is going to kill Europe soon.
The original idea was to have a free market area between the various members. Free circulation of persons and goods: could it get any better?
Instead we had a colossal behemoth, mimicking the worst out of every single member state, a colossal nose-picking bureaucracy which piles over the existing national ones. No matter is too small for the EU bureaucrat to start writing: take bananas for example. While pretty much everyone would agree over sanitary checks, but the EU went a step further and prescibed minimun and maximum size, curve ratio etc. OK, in reality is just another way to force imports of Cavendish type bananas from selected countries like Ecuador and ban them from other countries like Malaya but it’s a good example.
People are growing so tired and nauseated by the EU. Problem is we have no idea how to fight back: the Americans have their Constitution and Ron Paul, what we have here? We occasionally get a strong, decent personality like Pim Fortuyin but most of the time the opposition is in the hands of small time opposition leaders, who may well be well-meaning but lack the intellectual and economic means to fight back. Jorg Haider was one such personality.
Fortuyin was by far the most dangerous: well-read, serious and honest. He got murdered because he was too dangerous. Haider was basically a beer-hall, local politician with some right ideas but was easy meat for the all-powerful European press. He learnt his lesson and went back to be a small politician with some good ideas.
We don’t know how to fight back because we have been goaded into submission by a century and a half of public schooling, conscription and unmitigated propaganda. Our constitutions were not written to limit the Government’s power but to fossilize the shape of each national State for the centuries to come.
Our only hope is that our “dear leaders” will spend themselves into oblivion…
It was never meant to be a real free trade zone. Its earliest predecessor, the Montanunion, was meant as a heavily subsidized plan to regain war strength for the central European steel and coal industry, as the cold war was believed (or hoped) to turn into a hot war against the CCCP any time.
German and French politicians then always admitted that they were intending to bring the entire continent under the rule of one state. Especially French politicos could be quite elaborate on this topic, after losing three wars with Germany.
The Free Trade thing was a red herring, a public relation gag in order to keep he sheeple happy.
But the EU has reduced the power of the member states by accruing power to itself. This hardly qualifies as elimination of centralized power - it just moves it up a level of hierarchy and aggregates it there.
One of the fundamental properties of libertarian political organization is subsidiarity - the EU is precisely the opposite of that. Thus, in my view, it is a distinct move away from libertarian principles.
No offense, but I think this is a very naive view. Just because the bureaucrats said they wanted a free market doesn’t mean that’s what they wanted anymore than American Republicans want free trade and therefore support NAFTA. In both cases, what they were after was government management of trade - calling it ‘free’ doesn’t make it free.
And the proof of this is by looking at actions and outcomes - rather than by assuming politician’s promises were actually true and binding. As you note, it turned into a behemoth - my assertion is that this is what was always intended, and the ‘original idea’ you cite was merely the window dressing they used to sell it.
I can’t help but wonder if the liberalization of trade in the EU will make up for the extra government. Of course, it didn’t need another layer of government just to free up trade, but it seems like the only political way to fix one government program (barriers to trade) is with more, larger programs (NAFTA, WTO, EU, etc).
I suppose my view is that another layer of government never frees up trade. While this may appear to be the case on the surface, it just means more control - if and when they decide to exercise it. Make no mistake - government = coercion, even if it chooses for a while to pretend non-coercion. The levers are there, just hidden for now.
Interesting that you quote the definition of subsidiarity as espoused by the EU. You don’t seem aware that govts play word games. They do. Think: free trade = NAFTA.
While we’re at it, why don’t we just buy into these gems:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Are you seriously thinking that the bureaucrats in Brussels feel bound by the principles of subsidiarity to keep their hands out of ANY pies that would be more effectively administered locally??? If so, I have some beachfront property here in Phoenix we need to discuss.
A more realistic definition is given by Wikipedia:
Subsidiarity is the principle which states that matters ought to be handled by the smallest (or, the lowest) competent authority. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.
I gotta say - if you are more afraid of your neighbor than of agents of the State, I don’t know what you are doing here. You got it exactly backwards in my view. I suggest you pick up a copy of Vin Suprynowicz’ The Ballad of Carl Drega to see what ‘far-off bureaucrats’ are capable of.