From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Thu Aug 22 2002 - 18:37:40 MDT
On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 06:56:04PM -0400, Technotranscendence wrote:
>
> See http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsST080202.html
>
> What do the fans of the EU on this list have to say about the above?
Whingeing about CAP is nothing new. It's on the agenda for a fix -- a big,
painful fix -- but it's not really different from, say, GWB's recent huge
subsidies for the farming lobby.
> It
> looks to me like this higher level organization is partly just a way of
> extracting wealth from society. In other words, parasitism. Is such
> extranational parasitism Extropian? My belief is it's not. It puts a
> drag on social production/coordination and increases socio-economic
> entropy.
Ah, but the EU does other things. For starters, it's globalization done
right -- with free movement of labour alongside free movement of goods
and services. Efficient trade requires some degree of standardization
of, for example, weights and measures, labelling, quality metrics, and
so on: these are things the EU is good at. The single currency is also
a good idea, in principle -- arguments about it breaking down under the
economic differential between regions should be listened to with a pinch
of salt, after all the US dollar works equally well in South Carolina
and California, despite huge income disparities. And one thing we don't
hear a lot about is the size of the EU bureaucracy -- which, in total,
employs fewer officials (for a population of 320 million people) than the
Scottish Office of the UK government in Westminster (which duplicates
many functions carried out by the separate Scottish parliament and its
authorities -- for 5 million people).
Summary: the EU has problems but we'd have bigger problems without the
EU, and the problems are probably fixable.
-- Charlie
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