At <i>best,</i> the jury is still out. We will be able to consider the question rationally in, perhaps, a decade.<p>NONE of the Brexiters had any planning in place to get us from in EU to out. I honestly don't believe any of them even expected to win. The <i>only</i> politician with a plan of any form was Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP.<p>Britain is now experiencing overt racism like the last 40 years of progress didn't happen. Brexit has been taken as carte blanche to be proudly racist. I have witnessed this myself, last week, in an area where I'd have expected it to be non-existent.<p>The few politicians speaking are all seeking EU-lite, and it seems, wishing to rejoin as much of the single market (with associated costs) as possible.<p>By most measures it looks like it's shaping up to be a disaster for Britain.
The author fails to take in to account the short term issues associated with the Brexit.<p>For the next ten years, and probably more, Britain's economy is going to be all over the place. It will be hard to keep things stable whilst new treaties are negotiated and new trade links are established.<p>Britain is effectively rebooting its relationship with it's biggest trading partner. There is no way that such a move cannot have significant negative repercussions.<p>I've already seen such repercussions with UK friends who run small businesses being impacted the drop in the value of sterling. Another UK friend who runs a tourist coach business has been told by his EU based tour operator clients that once the Brexit happens they may have to drop him as a supplier - which now means a planned expansion has been put on hold. This is the sort of stuff happening even before article 50 is invoked, once that happens then all bets are off.<p>The leave camp didn't have a plan, but even if they did there would still be major negative effects on the UK. And so far people have only focused on issues surrounding trade the movement of people. There are dozens of other issues that will need to be dealt with as well such as standards compliance, product safety certifications, cross border consumer issues, science/R&D partnerships, the NI peace process, OpenSkies agreements and so on and so on.<p>Lets assume the author is correct in his thinking and that in 10-20 years the UK economy will be thriving, you can't deny it will have been a very, very painful journey to get there.
I find these "it's not so bad" posts laughable. There is zero direction and people already seem to know that it will be okay. People seem to forget that stable countries disintegrated not so long ago in Europe. One just think of what happened to Yugoslavia.
Not a word here about democracy. Lord Monckton summed it up very well: Where are the counter arguments?<p>"My three reasons for departure, in strict order of precedence, were Democracy, Democracy, and Democracy. For the so-called “European Parliament” is no Parliament. It is a mere duma. It lacks even the power to bring forward a bill, and the 28 faceless, unelected, omnipotent Kommissars – the official German name for the shadowy Commissioners who exercise the supreme lawmaking power that was once vested in our elected Parliament – have the power, under the Treaty of Maastricht, to meet behind closed doors to override in secret any decision of that “Parliament” at will, and even to issue “Commission Regulations” that bypass it altogether.<p>Worse, the treaty that established the European Stability Pact gives its governing body of absolute bankers the power, at will and without consultation, to demand any sum of money, however large, from any member state, and every member of that governing body, personally as well as collectively, is held entirely immune not only from any civil suit but also from any criminal prosecution.<p>That is dictatorship in the formal sense. Good riddance to it."
Points for ambition, but after opening the article by saying you disagree with the consensus economic analysis, you pretty much disqualify yourself from having an opinion on the economic analysis...<p><i>Britain could and should declare free trade unilaterally with every other nation, whether they reciprocate or not. They would become an incredibly dynamic and prosperous trading hub.</i><p>First, not sure if you understand how trading hubs work.*<p>Second, not sure you are listening to why people think Brexit is bad for the UK economy if you think this is the solution.<p>The biggest economic risk to the UK from Brexit doesn't come from the fact they now have to renegotiate access to the EU internal market, it comes from the fact that Scotland might decide to go independent.<p>In turn, that has unleashed a ton of uncertainty for banks like Royal Bank of Scotland that, you know, take deposits and make loans denominated in British pounds to Scottish people.<p>Even if you could manage the transition across independence, redenomination and recapitalization, the potential shock to credit/liquidity is sufficient that a LOT of babies are likely to get thrown out with that bathwater.<p>~~~~<p>* It's not really tarrifs that are the big constraints to trade these days, it's stuff like regulations (please no plastic in our baby formula, thx China), IP, 'dumping' etc.<p>That and the fact that giving nonreciprocal market access would mean you end up spending even more on imports than you receive in income from exports (they already do this...a lot).<p>Meaning you have to borrow money to finance consumption...until you borrow so much that the rest of the world stops lending you money...<p>this is (partially) why trading hubs tend to form in places that <i>export</i> a lot vs import a lot.<p>~~~<p>World Bank tarrif data: <a href="http://bit.ly/293JtWZ" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/293JtWZ</a>
Melanin in baby formula: <a href="http://bit.ly/29nVRQH" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/29nVRQH</a>
Regarding the "champion of free trade" idea that the article raises - this is pure fantasy. The idea of dropping your trade barriers and just hoping by some magic sense of fairplay everyone else will do the same is ludicrous. Ignoring the prima facie illogic of expecting selfless altruism from your trading partners, I know from experience that this will not work - as does everyone else in NZ. We know this because it was the brain-dead approach our governments took in the late 80's. It has lead to us having NOTHING to offer in trade deals as we'd already given away the family silver.<p>TL;DR, the OP is seriously confused about how economics works.
Points:<p>- "unrestricted free trade will be awesome"<p>- peace is not at stake, au contraire<p>- decentralization is awesome. And small is beautiful!<p>- it doesn't matter that it's a little about xenophobia<p>It sounds more like a prayer to Ricardo and the Seven because there really are no arguments given. "Let's try this awesome experiment because we're awesome!"<p>We'll hear this a lot - especially from the Boris Johnson side of the equation.<p>And the UK may well get the best out of this. It could become the mythical european Dubai, half fiscal paradise and half tech/creative/trade hub. This would also mean that the biggest losers would be the exact same people would voted for Brexit: white, older, English middle class. Politically, this will be interesting.
That graph is of course correct, but the question remains, at <i>what level</i> do you centralize? The idea of the EU is that the central point <i>is</i> the EU, and that it is the EU which makes deals with the rest of the blocks.<p>If we follow through with the idea that the ideal level is the nation state, the you have 200 odd countries doing deals with each other. Not very practical.<p>OR, we have several world regions doing deals with each other, plus the UK.<p>Which is a version of "Beggar_thy_neighbour" policy [1]: in a world in which countries in world regions are cooperating with each other by making compromises, there is <i>always</i> the option by one of those countries to play dirty and try to game the system (for example, tax heavens).<p>Note: this applies to <i>big issues</i>. There are things which are better decided at the national, regional or even the city level.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggar_thy_neighbour" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggar_thy_neighbour</a>
And then there's this:<p><a href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/683739/EU-referendum-German-French-European-superstate-Brexit" rel="nofollow">http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/683739/EU-referendum-...</a>
I think it's good in the long run too.<p>Maybe UK decunstructs itself, because Northern Ireland and Scottland leave it and join the EU anyway.<p>The EU can use the rest of UK to create an example, so no other country will leave in the future.<p>After that I think Londons tech hub will spread more to Ireland or Germany. Many people already use Ireland to create cheap companies and Berlin pushes hard to become the SF of Europe.<p>These will be bad times for the UK but I think it will wake the people up and they will fix their country.
> If you have ever travelled to Europe and tried to buy clothing, food, or a computer, this is why they are so much more expensive than in the US<p>I would like to see some figures for that, but I think that more than tariffs, the author is not taking into account the VAT, the price of carburant and some other things.
> There has been peace in Europe because, frankly, the Europeans are weak.<p>What is this? Most of the regions in conflict in the world are, according to the scales he sets, "weak".