Tag Archives: Brexit

From SLL, “You Say You Want a Devolution?” 4/29/16:

The most important election this year is the British referendum June 23 on EU membership. The EU has followed the US’s disastrous policies in the Middle East and Northern Africa and has been unable to deal with the refugee and terrorist blowback from those policies. It has no strategy for resolving the issues stemming from the debt of its de facto bankrupt members, other than have the ECB buy it. Growth has been smothered by taxes, regulations, cronyism, and monetary idiocy. European youth have the “opportunity” to pay some of the world’s highest tax rates to fund the world’s most generous welfare state benefits. Those looking for other opportunities—private sector jobs, leaving home, starting families, building wealth—must look elsewhere.

Why would Great Britain want to plight its troth with this gang of incompetents? Why would anyone think it can’t do better by going it alone? These are questions the political establishments in Europe, Great Britain, and the US would rather not have asked, much less have to answer. The animating impulse behind the Brexit movement is one no political power can acknowledge—the desire for more freedom from that political power. Does life become more or less free for the British if they subject themselves to cabbage regulations of 26,911 words? Individuals generally have more of a say in a smaller, closer governmental unit than a larger, more remote one. For anyone living in Great Britain, both literally and figuratively it’s a shorter trip to London than it is to Brussels.

At least the British have a chance to decide this question by a peaceful political process. In the US, smaller political subdivisions have no way to opt out, and this type of restriction characterizes political arrangements in much of the rest of world, leaving violence as the only way to sunder them. In that respect, the non-secession stricture needs urgent reconsideration. Centralization is collapsing under its own weight, discouraging its many proponents not at all. A decentralizing reversal will not be sufficient to restore freedom, but it will be necessary. Almost certainly that reversal will be accompanied by chaotic violence, as current arrangements leave no other choice.

Today’s behemoth governments secure few advantages to their productive and honest citizens, and exact myriad and substantial costs. If the collapse of centralization is accompanied by balkanization and devolution, then among the many smaller political subdivisions, enclaves devoted to liberty, limited government, and individual rights become real possibilities, provided they can secure their territories. Such enclaves of freedom would be havens for the productive and honest, at the forefront of innovation, economic progress, quality of life, and political expression. Smaller can be far more beautiful, peaceful, and prosperous than the current blobocracy.

The Brexit vote is more important than the US presidential election because whoever wins in November will be chained to the failing US government, while the British have an opportunity to shed some of their chains. Regardless of who wins in the US, the government will not relinquish its resources, power, or corruption. Centralization has advanced so far and so destructively that every expression or potential expression of a revolutionary desire for devolution—the transfer of power to lower levels and smaller subdivisions—is to be welcomed, be it Brexit or other countries leaving the EU, various separatist movements within countries, or mass disobedience to the dictates of centralized governments. As the Brexit vote and electoral insurgencies in the US and Europe make clear, the underlying pressures continue to build. Something’s got to give, and when it does, decentralization and devolution will give those seeking liberty a rare opportunity to build the kind of society they’ve always envisioned.

The tectonic shift of our times is the subduction of the decentralization plate under the command and control plate. Yesterday’s Brexit vote amounts to the first in what will be a series of earthquakes. SLL had enthusiastically, and erroneously, given that first earthquake designation to Greece’s “Oxi,” or No, vote last July on the EC, ECB, and IMF Troika’s debt proposals (“Oxi! Greece’s 9.0 Earthquake”), but the vote was squelched as its leaders buckled. Greece’s debt problems were papered over with yet another doomed-to-fail solution that guarantees a larger and more insolvable problem in the near future.

The European powers will try, but the Brexit vote will be much harder to subvert. Command and control, as embodied by the EU and every other supranational governing institution—and every national government—is under mortal stress, doomed by its massive failures and its incompatibility with the demands of human survival. The proponents of staying in the EU weren’t even saying to the British: give us one more chance and we’ll get it right. They were saying: stay with us and we’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing wrong. Who accepts such a manifestly idiotic bargain? The wonder is that the vote was close, but the fear-mongering status quo mounted a ferocious and extraordinarily mendacious campaign.

The vote will hasten the EU’s eventual demise, but the biggest loser may turn out to be the US government. It pushed hard for a European union at the end of World War II and has promoted it ever since (Obama did his own cause more harm than good by telling the British how to vote). The EU was to be America’s one stop vassal, much tidier than trying to herd all of Europe’s cats. Just yesterday, The Wall Street Journal, a house organ for US unipolarity, headlined, “U.S. Worries ‘Brexit’ Will Dent Its Clout.” The government is right to worry. The confederated empire will be much harder to maintain if the EU dissolves, especially with its other European pillar, NATO, under attack from Donald Trump.

The mainstream media may be loath to admit it, we’ll see, but the Trump and Sanders insurgencies, and the gathering strength of various European nationalist movements, stem from the same impetus as the Brexit vote. Trump was quick to capitalize, saying the British were taking back their country and Americans would do the same by electing him. Devolution is a messy process, but as one gang of statists likes to say, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Whether or not Trump is elected, devolution is an unstoppable centrifugal force and will have its day. That realization did not animate the British vote, but they just put themselves in a far better position to adapt to that reality than their continental compatriots.

The British people are to be congratulated for rejecting fear, embracing the future, and voting for sanity.

FROM A SANER TIME

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