Comment by dpwm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpwm | Hacker News Reader

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Just out of curiosity, what is your country? There are many countries at the moment that this could apply to, but most are already in the Euro which so far is a one-way trip.

> I won't trade sovereignity for convenience, regardless of social engineering coming from Bruxelles or Merkel.

This sounds a lot like Brexit leave campaign rhetoric and I suspect is the reason you're being downvoted. Regardless of how you feel about the EU and Brexit, sovereignty has to be one of the weaker aspects. Disliking the EU is fine, but let's be honest about why.

Consider the origin of most nation states. Smaller autonomous regions were invaded or bribed into some form of union. In many of these unions rules were harmonized to varying extents and sovereignty was ceded. Common currencies were also adopted in some of the unions.

Consider the nation state that you hold the sovereignty of so high. Imagine tomorrow it was split into two. Both of these regions have the same currency and many common rules and regulations. Given that it's highly probable that your country has fully embraced capitalism and derives much of its wealth through trade, it has a choice: change things or not. If you don't change anything you haven't really regained sovereignty. If you change things you're imposing barriers to trade. Given you had a common currency and rules before, there's a good chance that they were your preferred trading partner if the infrastructure was good enough. Interestingly, there are regions where intra-state infrastructure is better than inter-state infrastructure, usually due to geography.

But we can go deeper than that. We can keep subdividing from regions into cities into towns into households into individual people. Every time you go to the ballot box you acknowledge that you have ceded individual sovereignty.

All the evidence I've seen points to the sovereignty argument in Brexit wasn't about sovereignty being ceded, but who it was perceived as being ceded to. Because if the vision of the Brexit-supporting International Trade and Development Secretary is to be taken as the post-brexit plan, then Brexit will be all about ceding more sovereignty for less trade.

All the evidence I've seen points to the sovereignty argument in Brexit wasn't about sovereignty being ceded, but who it was perceived as being ceded to

They're impossible to disentangle.

Voters in the UK had for years been telling politicians, here's our priorities, here's what is upsetting us. Mostly, massive immigration that overloaded public services. In response they were told, sorry, we can't do anything about that, France and Germany won't let us. It's out of the question, even trying to talk about it is pointless. Oh yeah, and you're probably a racist for even asking.

Voters don't like being told to shut up because some foreign politician disagrees. Is that dislike a desire for "more sovereignty" or is it a problem with who power has been delegated to? Arguably if the UK had entered an EU-like arrangement with the USA instead, and become the 51st state, voters would have faced very similar concerns over things like gun control instead of immigration.

Ultimately technological progress does allow us to satisfactorily decentralise power in new ways. Some people want society to go in the opposite direction and centralise it as much as possible. This is a bad idea, and the Eurozone predicament is an interesting example of why.

> They're impossible to disentangle.

Well, it's made easier when you get people naming names of who the sovereignty is being ceded to. It's one thing to say "loss of sovereignty" and another to then go on to talk about who it's being ceded to. It's often not even correct.

> Mostly, massive immigration that overloaded public services.

Except it was per-capita underfunding that caused public services to be underfunded. Almost every study done on this found that EU migrants were on above-average wages and hence paying more tax. And if there weren't, there were measures that could have been implemented such as asking people under free movement rules to demonstrate their ability to support themselves and not be a burden to the state. Other EU states do this.

Most public services should decrease in cost per person as it scales up. If it's super-linear there's something seriously wrong with the way you deliver public services. So it was the underfunding per-capita of public services that was the problem. Instead of expanding public services, the coalition government cut them drastically whilst outsourcing everything they could.

> In response they were told, sorry, we can't do anything about that, France and Germany won't let us. It's out of the question, even trying to talk about it is pointless. Oh yeah, and you're probably a racist for even asking.

We heard a lot that it "was not racist to be concerned about immigration." And a good proportion of people who agreed with that were in fact racist. Let's be honest, a lot of people in this country are prejudiced against people based on their ethnicity, which is pretty much textbook racist. I've even heard on the doorstep that "it's alright to hate polish people because they're white." Attitudes like "they shouldn't be here" are quite common and seem to be more openly voiced after the referendum. It's certainly ignorant of history if you believe that immigration is a recent thing as many who espouse these attitudes seem to do. Go back a few of hundred years and you wouldn't have known if somebody was from the North or France. Both would be just as incomprehensible.

> Ultimately technological progress does allow us to satisfactorily decentralise power in new ways. Some people want society to go in the opposite direction and centralise it as much as possible. This is a bad idea, and the Eurozone predicament is an interesting example of why.

The Eurozone predicament is complicated. There are merits and demerits to centralisation. We should all be wary of extrapolating problems with one large system to all large systems.

The Eurozone predicament is complicated. There are merits and demerits to centralisation. We should all be wary of extrapolating problems with one large system to all large systems.

This is a convoluted way of refusing to answer my final point, perhaps you have no answer. But it nicely serves to prove my other points, so I can't be too annoyed about it.

Viz. the entire EU project is based on a totalitarian ideology that runs like this:

"Most people are stupid, base and racist. Giving them a choice about what happens is therefore very bad. The best social outcomes arise from massive centralisation of power in unchecked bureaucracies."

You are a prime example of this - you just asserted that most people in the UK are racist because they were concerned about the volume of immigration, although the UK is in fact the most ethnically diverse nation in Europe. You have no evidence to support such an astounding generalisation, and race-driven crime is actually very rare there. I mean you'd get a lot further arguing that most Americans are racist, even though that would be an absurd statement too. Polish isn't even a race, Polish people are white!

The reason it's impossible to disentangle loss of sovereignty from the question of who you're losing it to, is because centralisation of power inevitably corrupts people, and therefore who exactly benefits from such a loss is in many ways irrelevant. They'll do things that are at best a good fit for only one section of the population they control, and at worst are just a bad idea for everyone, but the nature of centralised power is that people can do a lot of damage in a short amount of time, and they're less willing to let go of it at the end.

Notice how even the EU's own institutions and biggest supporters are currently up in arms about the Selmayr affair. But who could be surprised, really? It's exactly the behaviour you'd expect to see.

Decentralization of power is not always better. It is one of the reasons that China could improve its economy faster than India, for example. Projects like Galileo are impossible without centralization. If the EU did not exist Trump could bully his way in Europe. And so on.

> You are a prime example of this - you just asserted that most people in the UK are racist because they were concerned about the volume of immigration, although the UK is in fact the most ethnically diverse nation in Europe. [...] Polish isn't even a race, Polish people are white!

Ethnicity is much more than looking alike. Not in Europe, nor in Asia, nor in Africa, nor in America (N or S). And a good % of people with Polish ancestry can be easily recognized in UK. They are not that similar.

And by the way, UK is not the most ethnically diverse country in Europe, the EU, or Western Europe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...

That table lists Russia and the Congo as more ethnically diverse than the UK. OK, if you define ethnicity in such a way that it has no correlation with skin colour or any of the traditional aspects of racism, then sure. Maybe there are more ethnic tribes or something in the Congo than the UK.

Now go define it in the way people actually mean when they talk about racism, and see what happens.

Projects like Galileo are impossible without centralization

That's clearly nonsense. The International Space Station is not the product of a giant centralised power structure. It's the result of an international collaboration amongst governments, none of them able to control the others. And the ISS is much more complex an endeavour than Galileo.

Look, (ethnic) Russian, (ethnic) Caucasians and Tatars do not look alike. Same in Congo with the Bantu, Pygmy and Nilotic. You are not even choosing good examples for your arguments. Most ethnics conflicts in the world might not even skin colour related because they occur between neighbors. Pakistan/India, the Balkans, Azerbaijan/Armenia etc.

But hey, whatever fits your narrative.

People from the north and south of England can often be told apart by how they look and sound, and north/south bias is a thing - does that make them different "ethnicities"?

I mean, the whole idea that the UK is a massively racist country is so silly nobody has tried to defend it, have they? As defined in a normal way - people of very different skin colours and origins getting along next to each other - the UK does very well.

> Polish isn't even a race, Polish people are white!

Polish is an ethnicity. Discrimination against somebody because of their ethnicity is racial discrimination at least according to the UN definition.

> most people in the UK are racist because they were concerned about the volume of immigration.

Most people didn't vote for Brexit. Only about 29% of the population did. I'm sure some of them are neither racist nor stupid.

A definition of 'racism' that includes "lots of people who look identical to me have turned up and now it takes ages to get a doctors appointment" is useless and deserves to be ignored - which it was, as evidenced by the population voting to leave despite being told it was "racist" to leave a union made up almost entirely of white people.

Most people didn't vote for Brexit. Only about 29% of the population did

Exclude the people who can't vote because they're children or not actually citizens, and you get a 72% turnout, the largest in history. Your claim is worded in such a way that it's technically correct whilst simultaneously being wildly misleading (who knows what 5 year olds think of the EU, and there are plenty of stories of naturalised Polish immigrants voting to leave...)

Voters in the UK had for years been telling politicians...

This is a very misleading account of the situation leading up to the EU referendum in the UK.

When David Cameron (former leader of the Conservative party) called the EU referendum, he did it principally to quell dissent within his own party. The Conservatives have long had a vocal contingent of MPs and members who wanted the UK to leave the EU and this was a chance to finally put the matter to rest within the party.

When voters chose Leave over Remain by a slim majority in the EU referendum (51.9% leave, 48.1% remain), the Conservatives were unprepared and had no plan in place for a Leave result.

Stop and think about that for a moment. The Conservatives called a referendum where the consequences of a leave vote would have a far-reaching and profound impact on the country's future, possibly for decades to come. And yet, astonishingly, they had no plan in place for such an eventuality. Now they ask us to trust them to negotiate Britain's exit from the EU. The Conservatives care more about their party than the country.

Re: Freedom of Movement - the rules state that EU citizens are free to live in other EU countries for at least 3 months. After 3 months, Governments are entitled to ask those EU citizens to prove they are working, registered students or have sufficient money to support themselves. The UK government chose not to implement any such checks. Theresa May (current Prime Minister) was the the minister responsible for immigration (Home Secretary) for 6 years and yet did nothing to adopt these measures.

When David Cameron (former leader of the Conservative party) called the EU referendum, he did it principally to quell dissent within his own party

That's the current narrative of EU loyalists but it's not at all correct.

There had been a eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party for decades. The referendum was put into the Conservative manifesto in 2015 because of the rise of UKIP which was making a similar promise - that's what changed. Putting this policy into the official policies of the party converted UKIP support into Conservative support and allowed Cameron to win a majority. Having promised to do it and won an election partly on the back of that promise, they then proceeded to organise it.

With respect to Cameron having no plan, I agree that was quite stupid of him. Refusal to contemplate the possibility of ever leaving is one of the big problems EU ideology creates in people. Convince yourself it's unthinkable and you won't think about it.

But it's not true that "the Conservatives" had no plan. The pro-Leavers certainly did and still do have a plan: leave the EU whilst negotiating a reasonable future relationship that involves compromises on both sides. So the idea that there's "no plan" is another nonsensical bit of narrative. What people mean is the "plan", such that it is, heavily relies on the EU being willing to negotiate and they aren't.

As for your last point, the top reason cited by voters for why uncontrolled immigration is a problem is pressure on public services. Being able to limit the numbers of unemployed and poor workers doesn't help with that, therefore, I'm not sure why you bring it up.

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