Brexit

The UK voted to leave the EU.

Some posts about it here, and here, and here, lots of articles at ZeroHedge, and I’ll add more later.

A few general thoughts: centralized, distant, bureaucracy-heavy control never works. It can’t. But people are lazy and easy to scare, so it’s easy to entice them into a honeytrap by promising them something for nothing and security. Orwell and Kafka and Rand understood it only too well, and people don’t want to hear the truth. But when reality is staring them in the face, they can wake up and make the hard decisions… because they see that although the short-term cost is high and painful, the long-term cost is crushingly unbearable. Congrats. UK. Now let’s see what you can do with the follow-through.

Updated thoughts: It’s likely that the powers that be, the global elite power-brokers, will try to make an example of the UK, making the break-up as painful and expensive for the people of England as possible and still not appear to take deliberate and public (i.e. visible) punitive actions. They will do it as a warning to anyone else that tries to gain  freedom for the chains of distant bureaucracy and. The bankers will save their own, but make others pay the cost, for all their tears they shed. It’s going to be a particularly ugly few years for the islands. But if they suck it up and live up to traditional “stiff upper lip” standards, and face the economic reality of the bad end of the debt cycle when the debts come due and the soul-crushing spirit-suck of the welfare state, they will survive. If they cave in like an addict that can’t go cold-turkey and go back for another hit of easy credit and cheap immigrant labor and overlooking corruption and incompetence and the downsides to diversity, then they are doomed.

I really, REALLY hope Kratman’s Caliphate doesn’t predict the future. And this may well be the inflection point, the fork in the road, where Europe goes one way…or the other.

2 thoughts on “Brexit

  1. The same description of course fits Washington as well as Brussels. The difference is that the Brits weren’t prevented from leaving by invading armies.

    1. Yes. But there are other important differences, too.
      DC took a number of decades to become hugely bloated, corrupt, inefficient, and involved in everything. It took a long time for the costs to trickle down and be fully realized. The EU got involved in just as much or more but in the span of two decades, so people noticed.
      There wasn’t such a large, single, important, and apparently over-riding issue (slavery) that could be used to obfuscate other issues. Slavery was a terrible thing and thinking about it made many people react emotionally rather than logically. It made for the nearly ideal issue to demagogue.
      The US had a history of being united – “hang together or we shall most assuredly hang apart.”, whereas the EU has a much more separate history as nations.
      It will take time to throw off the undue influence of DC, if we ever do. If we don’t, history will not look kindly on us.

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