Comment on Record number of people in UK live in ‘very deep poverty’, analysis shows

• GardenGeek@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Makes sense. If nothing else is available, we have to work with what we have.

  And thank you for the clarification. To clarify my point: I am not saying that Brexit was an absolute economic disaster… but that some wealthy Brexit supporters benefited disproportionately compared to the average citizen and therefore pus

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  • deHaga@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yeah, the bets were in on the £ already as it was way overvalued.

    The seeds of Brexit were sown when we didn’t get a referendum on Maastricht. That changed the game considerably and even further with Nice and Lisbon. It meant that regulating with common law would be replaced with Roman civil law, which is much more prescriptive and is unable to be changed by precedent.

    I’m just in favour of decentralisation, every time power has been centralised in Europe it has ended badly.

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    • GardenGeek@europe.pub ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’m just in favour of decentralisation, every time power has been centralised in Europe it has ended badly.

      I want to express my thoughts on this point. I believe that two things are true at the same time:

      1. Cooperation beats competition since competition wastes resources by hindering each other when those could have been better invested in reaching the shared goal.
      2. Representative systems get less efficient and more prone to corruption the bigger they get.

      Concerning European this imho boils down to two contrary tendencies: The bigger the EU and its bureaucracy gets the less efficient it works while at the same time the efficiency of the EU economy is increasing through ever deeper cooperation and standardization.

      Following this line of thought, the question of whether the EU benefits or harms its citizens is largely decided by the ratio of additional costs due to bureaucracy to benefits due to cooperation. Since the advantages of cooperation, especially within the single market, are immense (and are becoming increasingly important in a world where the European states are increasingly hostile to major powers), I tend to view the EU positively, even if centralized administration can create new problems. After all, what would be the alternative? European nation states have worked against each other and waged war for centuries. Now that the European colonial empires have collapsed and lost a great deal of influence, I find it highly questionable that this model would be promising in today’s world.

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      • deHaga@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I think competitive advantage is better than comparative in areas of innovation. The EU’s precautionary principle is safe, but timid. Roman civil law is restrictive and slow to adapt because judges cannot set precedent at lower levels and must apply the law as it is written.

        The trend in the UK is of devolving power to the nations. I’m not sure how far that could go. Will we see a return to regions like Wessex and Mercia? We only have representative democracy as a hangover of having to choose someone to travel to London on a horse. We have the technology now to communicate at light speed, and will soon have enough compute power to make the civil service 90% smaller.

        gov.uk/…/landmark-devolution-bill-brings-new-dawn…

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