Fear may strike out, to borrow an American movie title from an American sport and apply it to a British phenomenon. The powers that be are doing their best to scare Brits into remaining in the EU, but a Brexit would lead to some interesting opportunities. From Sean Corrigan at truesinews.com:
‘Dear True Sinews, what are your thoughts on Brexit? Roger Bootle wrote a piece in the Telegraph yesterday suggesting that just because everyone is saying one thing, it doesn’t necessarily follow they are right Currently, I sit firmly on the fence getting splinters! Neither side is convincing me either way.’
So wrote a friend the other day. What follows is my answer to his question.
Funnily enough, my first response to the letter to the Times, that highly-orchestrated, Orwellian protestation of orthodoxy, was to tweet about the infamous 364 economists who wrote decrying Howe’s 1981 budget under Thatcher. Ditto the IMF’s woeful track record or the Queen’s famous ‘How did no-one see it coming?’ question in 2008/9.
Consensus is never a determinant of truth and even, the cynic might say, is often proof of the opposite! Humanity has not moved from grubbing a living rooting for mammoth carrion to where it is today by being over respectful of consensus. In fact, the very nature of entrepreneurialism is to challenge consensus while mainstream economists are still denying the possibility that anyone could possibly have left a £10 note lying on the pavement!
The critical thing is not to get bound up in a further exercise of that stultifying doctrine of paralysis known as the ‘precautionary principle’ so beloved of the Khmer Vert eco-(in)activists. If we had never acted in any different fashion until we were absolutely certain of the outcome, we’d still be swinging from branches in the primaeval forest canopy.
Yes, there are risks – some calculable, many not – but there are also opportunities aplenty. That is why it is so shrewdly disingenuous of Project Fear to play up all the things that might go wrong and to try to paint the Leave camp’s case as insubstantial simply because the latter are being honest enough not to offer an entirely bogus prospectus of what they will do, once they’re out.
For the record, I don’t see Brexit as a panacea, but merely the chance to manage one’s own affairs and to conduct one’s own debates over what should or should not be done by the state in one’s name. As in all things, I hew to the principle that politics should be as parochial as possible, that we should be able to grab a delinquent politician by his lapels at any moment and set him to rights, as well as to clap a diligent one on the back in acclamation when he pops in the local pub for a pint.
Subsidiarity is the thing. Politics should work from the bottom up in widening circles of co-operation and conflict resolution, not diffuse down from on high as if it were Holy Writ. Thus, the smaller the state, the better. And before anyone quibbles about ‘Balkanisation’, being too small to suffer delusions of geopolitical grandeur and too narrowly based to succumb to the temptations of economic autarky, it behoves such statelets to get on well with their neighbours and to concert their efforts with them willingly so as to widen markets and to broaden the scope of mutually-enriching commercial intercourse as far as possible.
To continue reading: The Case for Brexit
