My rough calculations, which are in line with other estimates, suggest that Britain would end up about two percent poorer than it would otherwise be, essentially forever. That’s a big hit.
.. impacts of Brexit would be uneven: London and southeast England would be hit hard, but Brexit would probably mean a weakerpound, which might actually help some of the old manufacturing regions of the north.
.. For that is the most frustrating thing about the E.U.: Nobody ever seems to acknowledge or learn from mistakes.
.. The E.U.’s failures have produced a frightening rise in reactionary, racist nationalism — but Brexit would, all too probably, empower those forces even more, both in Britain and all across the Continent.
Brexit vote is about the supremacy of Parliament and nothing else: Why I am voting to leave the EU
Stripped of distractions, it comes down to an elemental choice: whether to restore the full self-government of this nation, or to continue living under a higher supranational regime, ruled by a European Council that we do not elect in any meaningful sense, and that the British people can never remove, even when it persists in error.
.. We are deciding whether to be guided by a Commission with quasi-executive powers that operates more like the priesthood of the 13th Century papacy than a modern civil service; and whether to submit to a European Court of Justice (ECJ) that claims sweeping supremacy, with no right of appeal.
.. The banking union belies its name. Germany and the creditor states have dug in their heels.
.. The Project bleeds the lifeblood of the national institutions, but fails to replace them with anything lovable or legitimate at a European level. It draws away charisma, and destroys it. This is how democracies die.
.. Nobody has ever been held to account for the design faults and hubris of the euro, or for the monetary and fiscal contraction that turned recession into depression, and led to levels of youth unemployment across a large arc of Europe that nobody would have thought possible or tolerable in a modern civilized society.
.. Has there ever been a proper airing of how the elected leaders of Greece and Italy were forced out of power and replaced by EU technocrats, perhaps not by coups d’etat in a strict legal sense but certainly by skulduggery?
.. On what authority did the European Central Bank write secret letters to the leaders of Spain and Italy in 2011 ordering detailed changes to labour and social law, and fiscal policy, holding a gun to their head on bond purchases?
.. You can argue too that the accession of thirteen new countries since 2004 – mostly from Eastern Europe – has changed the chemistry of the EU beyond recognition, making it ever less plausible to think of a centralized, close-knit, political union.
.. We require constant inflows of foreign capital to keep the game going, and are therefore vulnerable to a sterling crisis if foreigners lose confidence.
.. However unfair it may seem, the whole Western world deems Brexit to be an act of strategic vandalism at a time when Pax Americana is cracking and the liberal democracies are under civilizational threat.
.. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has ripped up the post-War rule book and is testing Nato every day in the Baltics; China’s construction of airfields along international shipping routes off the Philippines is leading to a superpower showdown with the US.
.. Americans of all people should understand why a nation may wish to assert its independence.
Becoming Europe
If American liberals want the continent’s solutions, they ought to also recognize its problems.
These policies achieved something remarkable, a terrific leap for working women. But they brought surprising downside risks
.. European women are more likely to work. But they are less likely to have advanced careers or hold management positions than American women.
.. But women also spend more weeks away from the office. When they return, they’re less likely to be promoted, having been out for so long.
.. New research summarized by economists at the OECD suggests that “when income inequality rises, economic growth falls” in large part because the poor are less likely to get an education and a productive job.
.. Taxing the rich to redistribute money to the poor (particularly to poor kids) seems to improve overall growth. The big alliterative tradeoff, perhaps, isn’t between efficiency and equality but rather between greed in the short term and growth in the long term.
How Islam Created Europe
In late antiquity, the religion split the Mediterranean world in two. Now it is remaking the Continent.
Indeed, early in the fifth century a.d., when Saint Augustine lived in what is today Algeria, North Africa was as much a center of Christianity as Italy or Greece. But the swift advance of Islam across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries virtually extinguished Christianity there, thus severing the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves
.. Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing Europe what it was against. Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery. Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution: Early modern Europe, starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East, then dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as something beautiful, fascinating, and—most crucial—inferior.
.. With these dictatorships holding their peoples prisoner inside secure borders—borders artificially drawn by European colonial agents—Europeans could lecture Arabs about human rights without worrying about the possibility of messy democratic experiments that could lead to significant migration.
..Though Europe’s elites have for decades used idealistic rhetoric to deny the forces of religion and ethnicity, those were the very forces that provided European states with their own internal cohesion.
..Europe has responded by artificially reconstructing national-cultural identities on the extreme right and left, to counter the threat from the civilization it once dominated.
.. “The West,” if it does have a meaning beyond geography, manifests a spirit of ever more inclusive liberalism. Just as in the 19th century there was no going back to feudalism, there is no going back now to nationalism, not without courting disaster. As the great Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen observed, “History does not turn back … All reinstatements, all restorations have always been masquerades.”