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Samizdata quote of the day – Europe is no longer a serious continent

It is not a victim of the collapse of the ‘rules-based order’, but of its own terrible decisions.

The cause of Europe’s shift into blandness and relative economic decline is not mysterious: it has developed into a top-down corporatist bureaucracy, where incumbents and well-connected lobbyists always push for ever more regulation until nimbler challengers do the rational thing and relocate to the United States. It is an awkward model for a continent whose historic edge was the opposite: dispersed power, fierce competition between jurisdictions, and constant pressure to innovate. Too often, the officials presiding over this drift are so far removed from the realities they regulate that, when growth stalls, they cannot talk intelligently about incentives, productivity, or risk-taking. So instead they reach for comforting abstractions about “values” and “leadership”.

Mark Brolin (£)

5 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – Europe is no longer a serious continent

  • Stonyground

    Would it be the case that, had the UK handled its move to independence properly, companies would have been relocating to Britain as well?

  • For sure, which makes the UK circa 2026 not just a disaster but also a tragedy

  • Fraser Orr

    FWIW here is some real (EU) data (US). In 2010 the EU and the US had about the same GDP, today the EU’s GDP is about 2/3 that of the US. It is worth saying that a lot of this “growth” is misleading since GDP tends to be very deceptive and it also treats inflation as “growth”. But these factors are the same both places.

    But per what Perry says — the UK missed a golden opportunity. A significant portion of that lost ten trillion dollars annually in GDP “growth” could have landed on British shores. Instead you landed hundreds of thousands of poor, skill-less migrants to add to your costs and not to your growth.

    FWIW Britain in the same timeframe went from about 26% of US GDP to 14% of US GDP.

    Good job conservative party, it is honestly hard to imagine how you could have done a worse job.

  • JohnK

    Meanwhile Spanner plots how to realign Britain with the EU. What a tool.

  • Paul Marks.

    Yes indeed – far from being “Europe” the European Union is the antithesis of everything that European civilization stood for.

    As for the United Kingdom – we vote for independence, but meaningless “Brexit” instead.

    The rule of officials and “experts” (loyal to the International Community – of which the European Union is also a part) – regardless of what political party the people elect.

    And the establishment want to do all this to the United States – and have already done terrible harm.

    The international establishment must be defeated – they are a clear and present danger to the survival of Western Civilization.

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