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Comment by spockz | Hacker News Reader

Yes, at this point I see no way forward except with the EU. Unless each individual country wants to go at it alone and eventually end up working as a Vasal state to either USA, Russia, or China.

The cost of products and manufacturing is so low that a significant part of the final price is made up of overhead costs such as tax, tariffs, and transport. All of these will go up by stepping out of the EU due to increased friction.

If anything, we should go a lot further into embracing the EU. In the current political landscape we are committed.

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Current nonEU members like Switzerland or England are vasals of who?

Prices of energy and basically everything in EU is so ridiculous high. Free marked is crippled because of centrally planed economics pushed by EU grants.

Switzerland applies many many EU-regulations without having a say in it.

They also pay towards EU funds.

They are also part of Schengen.

Other countries have also seen inflation of prices of energy and other things. I doubt any of this would become cheaper if you leave the eu.

Oh yes, EU has a solution! Its called CBDC. No cash, no different currency, just digital numbers. Im sure they solve inflation made by fiat money.

I think the widening of the EU that we have seen precludes the deepening of the EU that you advocate. This is a difficult balance. we should want deeper coordination within the EU. But we should also want to help and integrate our neighbors, rather than seeing them languish and become, as you put it, vassal states. And those goals are at odds.

This is partially because coordinating more countries is inherently more difficult if everyone can veto. But cultural diversity also plays a role. Deepening coordination means letting the EU decide more. Letting a more similar culture decide more will feeo better. beyond that, they are probably more likely to decide what you would have decided anyway. That is how a wider EU works against a deeper EU.

But the good thing about the EU and a lot of its programmes is that the future generations in each are more and more well-travelled and more and more accepting of other members' cultures. Even nowadays the attitude towards, say, Poland in most younger circles in the West is much more positive than it used to be 20 years ago. Give it enough time and the people of the bloc will learn how to deal with their neighbours' cultures.

you can have an economic community without the political aspect of it

What does that look like? Let's say you have a large exporting country that decides its exporting needs are more important than the employment needs of other countries in the block, how do you handle that without political alignment? Economic community is political community. The only question is what flavour of economic community, which IMO is where the EU has gone well off track.

Unfortunately, these days economic community is not enough. With the US slowly falling apart due to internal polarization, rusia and china trying to grap as much power as they can, Middle East far from stable, and the disrupting impact of climate change, focusing only on the economy ignores our biggest problems.

If you put ideology on first place, competition will crush you easily. China don't care about environment and they make high fortune on it, like other countries did previously.

What frustrate me most is how EU sponsor their business from our taxes in name of care about environment. Ie grants on photovoltaic panels that are made from 95% in China or donated EV's that ruin traditional car manufacturing in EU.

China will (and does to a certain extent) care about the environment because they know it will eventually be a massive problem for them. Their single-party state has only managed to stay in power because it's been very good at driving up the standards of living. And you can only pollute so much before those standards stop going up and people start to get displeased, which is why they've been trying so hard to move up the value chain and export their pollution to other countries (via cheap loans).

Which doesn't change anything I wrote above. Pollution is made and driven by centrally planed economics from our taxes.

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