Libertarian governments are constrained by the fact that they are imposing freedom on people who, most often, do not want it. Thus, Libertarian ideas are probably more successful than Libertarians realize: government policies are very likely more libertarian than the median voter...
"What I might call the elitist answer is that the decision should be made by by experts, who decide either to forbid gas stoves or allow you to have one."
to read "...either to forbid gas stoves or require you to have one."
Your building’s superintendent or your homeowner’s insurance may legitimately care about whether you’re using a gas stove due to the added risk of fire or a gas leak to the building.
Your health insurance company may legitimately care about your gas stove because it means more exposure to VOCs and CO2 and this raises your risks of lung cancer and other issues.
Having significant experience in natural gas flames and a reasonably deep knowledge of Thermodynamics ( Ph.D. level experience), I know that most of the so-called research on gas stoves is inconsistent with reality. I looked at the papers claiming impacts and NOx creation and how they did their experiments, and it smelled of "tobacco science," where you get the answers the government and activist NGO's funders wanted. The formation of NOx from N2 and O2 in the air is a process where the absolute temperature is exponentially critical. In the 1970s, we could never get enough NOx from stoves and water heater burners to measure the generation rates (these flames were not hot enough). The flames in a 100 MW gas-fired boiler were hot enough, and so was the flame at 10 atmospheres pressure in a gas turbine or a diesel/gasoline engine.
I have watched the quality of science in government regulatory agencies decay over the decades as the HR seems to staff these agencies with environmental activists and lawyers who don't really understand the subject they are responsible for. Fools is a generous description of these bureaucrats. The kinetic equations for NOx formation haven't changed in over half a century.
It is a bit ironic that California wants to eliminate gas stoves and use electricity, which will produce more NOx pollution. The net CO2 emissions issue is more complex as cooks breathe out CO2.
To say that each individual should decide for themselves is a misunderstanding of libertarianism. The main libertarian position is that individuals act in their own interest, so we should expect gas stove bans by experts in government to not be about whether gad stoves are bad, but about the personal incentives those experts face. That is, government officials suffer from a market failure because their personal interests are different than the public interest so cannot be trusted to make the decision. Let's contrast that with a libertarian system where health insurers are free to differentiate rates based on whether gas stoves are in your house. In practice, gas stoves could end up effectively banned if the health insurance rates for people living in houses with gas stoves are too high. The difference between the insurance ban and the government ban is one of incentives: profit maximizing insurers will decide what rate to charge for gas stove owners on the increased cost of health care, whereas experts follow their personal biases and preferences.
two comments. 1. under certain conditions, the wisdom of the crowds (a proxy for democracy) works way better than expert decisions 2. unfortunately the marxist approach that dominates many western societies sells the supposed expert decisions (often learned ignoramus) as democracy without even an hint of cost and benefit analysis (think energy policies)
Conservatives fear the gays who want to marry each other, the women who want to control their own reproduction, the people who want to choose their own religion and the men who want to be women. Progressives fear the people who love their guns and their F-450 Super Duty trucks and the people who use plastic straws and burn coal.
But who is it who calls Child Protective Services when they "spot a neighbor’s 8-year-old walking by himself"?
As a conservative minded person, I disagree. What I fear is not the people making choices I disagree with. Rather, I fear those advocating choices I disagree with will make use of government to encourage those choices and discourage the choices I believe are preferable.
The government has tremendous power, especially when one considers "government" runs K-12 education and largely funds college education. Government also exercises tremendous power via civil rights laws to dictate social norms, as it sees them.
Consequently, as a conservative minded person, I am wary of any union between government and social advocacy, for I do not think it is beneficial to society at large for government to make itself a promoter of agendas, save those agendas which are proven to be beneficial to society.
This points to the great harm of abortion and LGBTQ advocacy, especially as it takes place in schools and indoctrinates youth. An agenda that is proven to be extremely beneficial to society is girls and boys growing up, marrying and having children. Now, we may worry that we don't want the education system pounding this into the minds of kids - leave that for the churches - but certainly, we should not have government sponsored schools where this most beneficial agenda is mocked and discouraged and the alternative is celebrated!
So while I lean libertarian in that people should be left alone and kids should enjoy a "free-range" experience and I favor very liberal interpretation of the 1st and 2nd Amendments, I recognize that society benefits from good cultural values and it really helps for government to support those values.
Unfortunately in America today, government support for positive cultural values is not universal, and one typically has to pay up to live in a community that promotes them. This is so because government has been corrupted by Progressive thought where offending people with traditional values is the greatest offense of all. The anti-police advocacy that is now policy in too many urban communities is illustrative of this corruption. How did it happen that stealing became acceptable? It happened because anti-police advocates gained power in their respective governments and turned their really bad ideas into really bad public policy.
Isn't there a symmetry on both these issues though?
> This points to the great harm of abortion and LGBTQ advocacy
You say you don't want the government promoting LGBT agendas or advocating for abortion and yet progressives might similarly say that they don't like the *government banning abortion or LGBT needs like marriage.
Both amount to using the government to restrict other people's liberty (FOOL: Fear Of Others’ Liberty). I don't see the distinction that you are making.
* I understand that you personally, as a libertarian, might not want to restrict women's liberty to choose abortion or gay men's liberty to marry but I am sure you would agree that most conservatives would very much want to restrict both.
There is and I don't have an answer except that ultimately people get the government and policies they tolerate, even if those policies are not helpful to their wellbeing.
The argument on pharma advertising is a good case to examine. The liberty minded person is inclined to say that government should not restrict speech. The elitist is inclined to say that people need to be protected from pharma advertising products people don't really need - the classic people do not know what is good for them argument.
My position: Both arguments are correct. I oppose government restrictions on speech but I also recognize that many people do not know what is good for them and pharma ads take advantage of this ignorance.
My answer: I don't know. If I were king I suppose I would propose that anti-pharma advocacy be granted a percentage of air-time to counter all the pro-pharma messaging. But besides this idea adding government interference, which I generally oppose, it fails to address the larger issue.
I believe that the greater problem with pharma ads is not the personal consumption of pharma but the problem of pharma spending so much money on the media industry that the media industry becomes captive to pharma. A main issue with all corporate speech is that the spending is so one sided that the platforms who benefit from the corporate spending become aligned with those corporate interests. This is a issue with corporate spending on politics and while I agree with the Citizens United decision, I recognize that corporate money is a threat to freedom.
So how does society help itself not become captive to corporate interests? Is society at risk of becoming captive to corporate interests? I'm not sure. But I do believe the words of Adam Smith when he wrote: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Should people do something about this conspiracy? Is doing something anti-freedom? I at least wish the public could have this conversation, but it is a conversation corporations and their many media and political friends do not want to have.
I recently moved home to England after many years in the United States and if there is one thing I wish I could have brought home with me, it is the First Amendment. Speech control is out of control over here. My country is also a little bit too in love with regulations but…
…I will never have to watch another pharmacy ad and I love that!
Like you, I'm torn over whether I prefer No Pharma Ads to No Rules About Pharma Ads.
I think we're very close to the point where multi-national corporations will rule the world and liberty and justice will soon be forgotten.
I regret I have only one like to give to this comment.
I see a bunch of people making (usually more eloquently than I could have) the point that the framing of this question, and especially the chosen acronym, appears to have been done to deliberately belittle a very real construct that beliefs often lead to actions, and those actions can be very detrimental both to specific groups and society at large.
If Islamists were content to simply think Jews were detestable people best avoided, nobody would particularly care about that *belief*. When it gets transmitted into the actions of forcibly ejecting them from physical real estate, it's another matter.
Democracy works when people know themselves to be equally worthy in the eyes of a Higher spiritual realm from which we emerged. Without that sense of inherent dignity—despite our propensity to rely on “specialness” or ego defenses, we succumb to our worst instincts. When the ego is left unchecked, principles of decency degrade, a society unravels and, regardless of draconian machinations to control one another, we find ourselves o in greater and greater chaos. We must come to learn how the ego within each of us undermines our capacity for wisdom —which is intelligence that “knows” the primacy of heart-centered values. There is no crustal ball, but the power of conscience and Greater Consciousness will never steer us astray. In the craziness humans have made by denying our inner divinity, we find ourselves now in the midst of a huge reckoning with our collective karma. We are all in this together whether we are ready to admit it if not. The sooner we do, the sooner we can correct course and evolve rather than devolve.
Arnold ascribes the growth in government to increased interdependency leading to more instances of friction, and to people's "fear of others' liberty." I see the growth in government as primarily due to its having become a vehicle for legal social predation, a new Hobbesian war of all against all. Crony capitalism has replaced much of the market economy, and it is amazing what wealth can be gained for relatively little political investment. All under the spurious moral justification of Progressive meliorism, of course.
Democracy works well for simple things, like church pot lucks. Democracy is ill suited as a means of governance. The confusion is that democracy is very important for citizen involvement in a community, but we cannot have nor expect the citizenry to govern society.
A healthy society needs citizens who largely govern themselves. We want a community where the police and social workers are scarcely needed, because the people follow the law and take care of themselves and dependents and do so without coercion.
The less society expects the citizenry to govern itself, the more it invites FOOLs to disrupt the citizens and complicate society. So just as a healthy community creates a virtuous cycle of prosperity, an unhealthy community invites a negative spiral of constant interference of foolish interference.
One of my fantasies which led to my Chartertopia was to imagine a government stripped of its enforcement powers.
* No prosecutors or police; all enforcement is by private citizens.
* Loser pays everything associated with the prosecution: court costs, travel, time off work, investigation.
* Throw out laws and regulations which are not consistently enforced. FBI 2017 stats say murder has a 61% clearance rate, rape 34%. Both are far better than speeding, which is probably 1 out of 1000 at best. or the drug war.
In effect, if people don't like laws, they don't prosecute them, and they are thrown out. If enforcement is too inconsistent because laws are too muddled and confusing, throw them out.
There's also what someone called the law of bureaucrats: they can only measure success by the number of subordinates, the size of their budgets, and the number of new regulations they issue. Therefore their instinct is to grow, and the last thing they want is to solve the problems on which they depend for existence.
Government and private bureaucrats are different only in government bureaucrats having no competition to keep their numbers down, and in governments defining their own limits instead of customers and competitors. The clearest example in my eyes is immunity. The Supreme Court "confirmed" absolute judicial immunity and invented qualified immunity for all government employees in 1967, and invented absolute prosecutorial immunity in 1976. When police break the law to collect evidence, the evidence is thrown out rather than prosecute the crime committed by the police. They are all government employees looking out for each other in ways that private citizens cannot.
I suggest reading "The Unaccountability Machine" by Davies about the industrialisation of decision-making – the methods by which, over the last century, the developed world has arranged its society and economy so that important institutions are run by processes and systems, operating on standardised sets of information, rather than by individual human beings reacting to individual circumstances.
Davies, Dan. The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind (p. 3). Profile. Kindle Edition.
Interesting concept. Let me add a point that many Americans seem to miss. A rule-based international economic order is a powerful instrument to constrain the FOOLs worst instincts. Although the EU is often regarded as a bureaucratic nightmare, its Single Market and competition rules have mightily worked to sustain economic freedom especially in countries where there is little traditional attachment for it (eg Italy). Unfortunately things seem to have taken a turn for the worse recently, under the joint pressure of the ‘green’ ideology and perceived ‘unfair’ competition from outside the bloc. In this connection the effective repudiation by the US of a rule-based international economic order - in particular, the WTO regime - is a major tragedy. I find it depressing
that American commentators, including those of liberal (in the European sense of the term) bent, seem to have very little to say about it. Freedom is not a state of nature but demands institutions, both domestically and internationally. If you consider that more democracy would be overall bad for America - and I tend to share your ‘heretic’ sentiment including for Europe (which I know better) - should not the same consideration lead to the conclusion that it would be good for America to be more restrained by international rules?
The UE is a bureaucratic nightmare that invites FOOLs. All the while it is possible the EU is preferable to the alternative approaches of international agreements of nations that share so many boundaries and are so geographically close.
Bothersome government is preferable to world wars. People should, as a common objective, want to avoid having awful government so as to avoid the military conflict such government invites. But who decides what is awful government?
I think this is why BREXIT is an acceptable democratic vote. It is better to allow the people to express their frustration with a ballot than with a gun. And government being what it is, no vote is final. Has the UK actually done "BREXIT". But at least the citizens of Britain had a chance to say they prefer a little more national autonomy, even if their elected leaders disagree.
Libertarian governments are constrained by the fact that they are imposing freedom on people who, most often, do not want it. Thus, Libertarian ideas are probably more successful than Libertarians realize: government policies are very likely more libertarian than the median voter...
You're setting up Democracy vs. Technocracy, while ignoring that America was originally a Republic.
Republics are not direct Democracy's as Republics insulate decisions from citizens.
I would re-write this sentence:
"What I might call the elitist answer is that the decision should be made by by experts, who decide either to forbid gas stoves or allow you to have one."
to read "...either to forbid gas stoves or require you to have one."
Yes, FOOLs are a huge problem, but they are just a subset of authoritarians on both left and right.
Your building’s superintendent or your homeowner’s insurance may legitimately care about whether you’re using a gas stove due to the added risk of fire or a gas leak to the building.
Your health insurance company may legitimately care about your gas stove because it means more exposure to VOCs and CO2 and this raises your risks of lung cancer and other issues.
Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.
Having significant experience in natural gas flames and a reasonably deep knowledge of Thermodynamics ( Ph.D. level experience), I know that most of the so-called research on gas stoves is inconsistent with reality. I looked at the papers claiming impacts and NOx creation and how they did their experiments, and it smelled of "tobacco science," where you get the answers the government and activist NGO's funders wanted. The formation of NOx from N2 and O2 in the air is a process where the absolute temperature is exponentially critical. In the 1970s, we could never get enough NOx from stoves and water heater burners to measure the generation rates (these flames were not hot enough). The flames in a 100 MW gas-fired boiler were hot enough, and so was the flame at 10 atmospheres pressure in a gas turbine or a diesel/gasoline engine.
I have watched the quality of science in government regulatory agencies decay over the decades as the HR seems to staff these agencies with environmental activists and lawyers who don't really understand the subject they are responsible for. Fools is a generous description of these bureaucrats. The kinetic equations for NOx formation haven't changed in over half a century.
It is a bit ironic that California wants to eliminate gas stoves and use electricity, which will produce more NOx pollution. The net CO2 emissions issue is more complex as cooks breathe out CO2.
To say that each individual should decide for themselves is a misunderstanding of libertarianism. The main libertarian position is that individuals act in their own interest, so we should expect gas stove bans by experts in government to not be about whether gad stoves are bad, but about the personal incentives those experts face. That is, government officials suffer from a market failure because their personal interests are different than the public interest so cannot be trusted to make the decision. Let's contrast that with a libertarian system where health insurers are free to differentiate rates based on whether gas stoves are in your house. In practice, gas stoves could end up effectively banned if the health insurance rates for people living in houses with gas stoves are too high. The difference between the insurance ban and the government ban is one of incentives: profit maximizing insurers will decide what rate to charge for gas stove owners on the increased cost of health care, whereas experts follow their personal biases and preferences.
two comments. 1. under certain conditions, the wisdom of the crowds (a proxy for democracy) works way better than expert decisions 2. unfortunately the marxist approach that dominates many western societies sells the supposed expert decisions (often learned ignoramus) as democracy without even an hint of cost and benefit analysis (think energy policies)
'experts' is just another way of saying "shut up"
because
knowing how to do a thing doesn't give you any special insight into IF the thing should be done
Conservatives fear the gays who want to marry each other, the women who want to control their own reproduction, the people who want to choose their own religion and the men who want to be women. Progressives fear the people who love their guns and their F-450 Super Duty trucks and the people who use plastic straws and burn coal.
But who is it who calls Child Protective Services when they "spot a neighbor’s 8-year-old walking by himself"?
Would that be a conservative or a progressive?
As a conservative minded person, I disagree. What I fear is not the people making choices I disagree with. Rather, I fear those advocating choices I disagree with will make use of government to encourage those choices and discourage the choices I believe are preferable.
The government has tremendous power, especially when one considers "government" runs K-12 education and largely funds college education. Government also exercises tremendous power via civil rights laws to dictate social norms, as it sees them.
Consequently, as a conservative minded person, I am wary of any union between government and social advocacy, for I do not think it is beneficial to society at large for government to make itself a promoter of agendas, save those agendas which are proven to be beneficial to society.
This points to the great harm of abortion and LGBTQ advocacy, especially as it takes place in schools and indoctrinates youth. An agenda that is proven to be extremely beneficial to society is girls and boys growing up, marrying and having children. Now, we may worry that we don't want the education system pounding this into the minds of kids - leave that for the churches - but certainly, we should not have government sponsored schools where this most beneficial agenda is mocked and discouraged and the alternative is celebrated!
So while I lean libertarian in that people should be left alone and kids should enjoy a "free-range" experience and I favor very liberal interpretation of the 1st and 2nd Amendments, I recognize that society benefits from good cultural values and it really helps for government to support those values.
Unfortunately in America today, government support for positive cultural values is not universal, and one typically has to pay up to live in a community that promotes them. This is so because government has been corrupted by Progressive thought where offending people with traditional values is the greatest offense of all. The anti-police advocacy that is now policy in too many urban communities is illustrative of this corruption. How did it happen that stealing became acceptable? It happened because anti-police advocates gained power in their respective governments and turned their really bad ideas into really bad public policy.
Isn't there a symmetry on both these issues though?
> This points to the great harm of abortion and LGBTQ advocacy
You say you don't want the government promoting LGBT agendas or advocating for abortion and yet progressives might similarly say that they don't like the *government banning abortion or LGBT needs like marriage.
Both amount to using the government to restrict other people's liberty (FOOL: Fear Of Others’ Liberty). I don't see the distinction that you are making.
* I understand that you personally, as a libertarian, might not want to restrict women's liberty to choose abortion or gay men's liberty to marry but I am sure you would agree that most conservatives would very much want to restrict both.
There is and I don't have an answer except that ultimately people get the government and policies they tolerate, even if those policies are not helpful to their wellbeing.
The argument on pharma advertising is a good case to examine. The liberty minded person is inclined to say that government should not restrict speech. The elitist is inclined to say that people need to be protected from pharma advertising products people don't really need - the classic people do not know what is good for them argument.
My position: Both arguments are correct. I oppose government restrictions on speech but I also recognize that many people do not know what is good for them and pharma ads take advantage of this ignorance.
My answer: I don't know. If I were king I suppose I would propose that anti-pharma advocacy be granted a percentage of air-time to counter all the pro-pharma messaging. But besides this idea adding government interference, which I generally oppose, it fails to address the larger issue.
I believe that the greater problem with pharma ads is not the personal consumption of pharma but the problem of pharma spending so much money on the media industry that the media industry becomes captive to pharma. A main issue with all corporate speech is that the spending is so one sided that the platforms who benefit from the corporate spending become aligned with those corporate interests. This is a issue with corporate spending on politics and while I agree with the Citizens United decision, I recognize that corporate money is a threat to freedom.
So how does society help itself not become captive to corporate interests? Is society at risk of becoming captive to corporate interests? I'm not sure. But I do believe the words of Adam Smith when he wrote: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Should people do something about this conspiracy? Is doing something anti-freedom? I at least wish the public could have this conversation, but it is a conversation corporations and their many media and political friends do not want to have.
I recently moved home to England after many years in the United States and if there is one thing I wish I could have brought home with me, it is the First Amendment. Speech control is out of control over here. My country is also a little bit too in love with regulations but…
…I will never have to watch another pharmacy ad and I love that!
Like you, I'm torn over whether I prefer No Pharma Ads to No Rules About Pharma Ads.
I think we're very close to the point where multi-national corporations will rule the world and liberty and justice will soon be forgotten.
I regret I have only one like to give to this comment.
I see a bunch of people making (usually more eloquently than I could have) the point that the framing of this question, and especially the chosen acronym, appears to have been done to deliberately belittle a very real construct that beliefs often lead to actions, and those actions can be very detrimental both to specific groups and society at large.
If Islamists were content to simply think Jews were detestable people best avoided, nobody would particularly care about that *belief*. When it gets transmitted into the actions of forcibly ejecting them from physical real estate, it's another matter.
Democracy works when people know themselves to be equally worthy in the eyes of a Higher spiritual realm from which we emerged. Without that sense of inherent dignity—despite our propensity to rely on “specialness” or ego defenses, we succumb to our worst instincts. When the ego is left unchecked, principles of decency degrade, a society unravels and, regardless of draconian machinations to control one another, we find ourselves o in greater and greater chaos. We must come to learn how the ego within each of us undermines our capacity for wisdom —which is intelligence that “knows” the primacy of heart-centered values. There is no crustal ball, but the power of conscience and Greater Consciousness will never steer us astray. In the craziness humans have made by denying our inner divinity, we find ourselves now in the midst of a huge reckoning with our collective karma. We are all in this together whether we are ready to admit it if not. The sooner we do, the sooner we can correct course and evolve rather than devolve.
Arnold ascribes the growth in government to increased interdependency leading to more instances of friction, and to people's "fear of others' liberty." I see the growth in government as primarily due to its having become a vehicle for legal social predation, a new Hobbesian war of all against all. Crony capitalism has replaced much of the market economy, and it is amazing what wealth can be gained for relatively little political investment. All under the spurious moral justification of Progressive meliorism, of course.
Democracy works well for simple things, like church pot lucks. Democracy is ill suited as a means of governance. The confusion is that democracy is very important for citizen involvement in a community, but we cannot have nor expect the citizenry to govern society.
A healthy society needs citizens who largely govern themselves. We want a community where the police and social workers are scarcely needed, because the people follow the law and take care of themselves and dependents and do so without coercion.
The less society expects the citizenry to govern itself, the more it invites FOOLs to disrupt the citizens and complicate society. So just as a healthy community creates a virtuous cycle of prosperity, an unhealthy community invites a negative spiral of constant interference of foolish interference.
One of my fantasies which led to my Chartertopia was to imagine a government stripped of its enforcement powers.
* No prosecutors or police; all enforcement is by private citizens.
* Loser pays everything associated with the prosecution: court costs, travel, time off work, investigation.
* Throw out laws and regulations which are not consistently enforced. FBI 2017 stats say murder has a 61% clearance rate, rape 34%. Both are far better than speeding, which is probably 1 out of 1000 at best. or the drug war.
In effect, if people don't like laws, they don't prosecute them, and they are thrown out. If enforcement is too inconsistent because laws are too muddled and confusing, throw them out.
There's also what someone called the law of bureaucrats: they can only measure success by the number of subordinates, the size of their budgets, and the number of new regulations they issue. Therefore their instinct is to grow, and the last thing they want is to solve the problems on which they depend for existence.
Government and private bureaucrats are different only in government bureaucrats having no competition to keep their numbers down, and in governments defining their own limits instead of customers and competitors. The clearest example in my eyes is immunity. The Supreme Court "confirmed" absolute judicial immunity and invented qualified immunity for all government employees in 1967, and invented absolute prosecutorial immunity in 1976. When police break the law to collect evidence, the evidence is thrown out rather than prosecute the crime committed by the police. They are all government employees looking out for each other in ways that private citizens cannot.
I suggest reading "The Unaccountability Machine" by Davies about the industrialisation of decision-making – the methods by which, over the last century, the developed world has arranged its society and economy so that important institutions are run by processes and systems, operating on standardised sets of information, rather than by individual human beings reacting to individual circumstances.
Davies, Dan. The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind (p. 3). Profile. Kindle Edition.
Interesting concept. Let me add a point that many Americans seem to miss. A rule-based international economic order is a powerful instrument to constrain the FOOLs worst instincts. Although the EU is often regarded as a bureaucratic nightmare, its Single Market and competition rules have mightily worked to sustain economic freedom especially in countries where there is little traditional attachment for it (eg Italy). Unfortunately things seem to have taken a turn for the worse recently, under the joint pressure of the ‘green’ ideology and perceived ‘unfair’ competition from outside the bloc. In this connection the effective repudiation by the US of a rule-based international economic order - in particular, the WTO regime - is a major tragedy. I find it depressing
that American commentators, including those of liberal (in the European sense of the term) bent, seem to have very little to say about it. Freedom is not a state of nature but demands institutions, both domestically and internationally. If you consider that more democracy would be overall bad for America - and I tend to share your ‘heretic’ sentiment including for Europe (which I know better) - should not the same consideration lead to the conclusion that it would be good for America to be more restrained by international rules?
The UE is a bureaucratic nightmare that invites FOOLs. All the while it is possible the EU is preferable to the alternative approaches of international agreements of nations that share so many boundaries and are so geographically close.
Bothersome government is preferable to world wars. People should, as a common objective, want to avoid having awful government so as to avoid the military conflict such government invites. But who decides what is awful government?
I think this is why BREXIT is an acceptable democratic vote. It is better to allow the people to express their frustration with a ballot than with a gun. And government being what it is, no vote is final. Has the UK actually done "BREXIT". But at least the citizens of Britain had a chance to say they prefer a little more national autonomy, even if their elected leaders disagree.