What would you do with the EU?

[Fried_Egg]

I was quite anti the EU but then I read this in “Bureaucracy” by Ludwig Von Mises:

The equilibrium in the distribution of powers between the Federal Government and the States as established by the Constitution has been seriously disturbed because the new powers that the authorities acquired for the most part accrued to the Union and not to the States. This is not the effect of sinister machinations on the part of mysterious Washington cliques, eager to curb the States and to establish centralization. It is the consequence of the fact of the fact that the United States is an economic unit with a uniform monetary and credit system with free mobility of commodities, capital, and men among the States. In such a country, government control of business must be centralized. It would be out of the question to leave it to the individual States. If each State were free to control business according to its own plans, the unity of the domestic market would disintegrate. State control of business would be practicable only if every State were in a position to separate its territory from the rest of the nation by trade and migration barriers and an autonomous monetary and credit policy.

If all trade barriers between member states were to be eliminated in Europe, a centralisation of political power would surely be the innevitable result? There are many things that the EU has achieved (or is striving to achieve) that most libertarians should approve of: Removal of trade barriers, free movement of capital and people, etc. If Mises was right, then we should expect to see a centralisation of political power across the EU. And if we are minachists like he was, we should welcome it as a good thing.

Now anarchists on the other hand would be bound to take a different view. I suppose they would prefer to break up nation states into smaller and smaller units, a continuous decentralising of power until the state has disappeared entirely.

But I am not an anarchist. I guess I should be in favour of the EU but focus on reform to stop the growth in the concentration (rather than centralisation) of power. Probably a futile hope, I know.