​Brexit: Surf or Freeman that is the question

Brexit vote is about the supremacy of Parliament and nothing else: Why I am voting to leave the EU

This is not even a question, liberty is the answer, always. Cincinnatus, and George Washington knew this and wisely executed on this. 

​Much more after the page break.

"Stripped of distractions, [Brexit] 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."

Actually, stripped down, it is do we rule ourselves, or are we serfs to foreign masters? 

Republicanism by Maurizio Viroli

"Classical republican writers maintained that to be free means to not be dominated--that is, not to be dependent on the arbitrary will of other individuals. The source of this interpretation of political liberty was the principle of Roman law that defines the status of a free person as not being subject to the arbitrary will of another person--in contrast to a slave, who is dependent on another person's will. As the individual is free when he or she has legal and political rights, so a people or a city is free insofar as it lives under its own laws. [...] 

Classical republican theorists also stressed that the constraint that fair laws impose on an individual's choices is not a restriction of liberty but an essential element of political liberty itself. They also believed that restrictions imposed by the law on the actions of rulers as well as of ordinary citizens are the only valid shield against coercion on the part of any person or persons. Machiavelli forcefully expressed this belief in his Discourses on Livy (I.29), when he wrote that if there is even one citizen whom the magistrates fear and who has the power to break the law, then the entire city cannot be said to be free. It can be said to be free only when its laws and constitutional orders effectively restrain the arrogance of nobles and the licentiousness of the people."

Liberty through republican governance or serfdom? Simple question, impossible to understand why anyone would agree to serfdom, we know exactly what happens over time in this model. 

The serfdom model requires a neo-feudal model, but since we no longer live in an agricultural society, but an industrial society, the model is not feudal in nature but socialist in nature, because the feudal model applied to the industrial society results in what we call socialism. 

This will not be a "democratic" socialism or a republican socialism, but something more soviet, more authoritarian. There will be no need to read between the lines, the intent will be obvious.

"The EU crossed a fatal line when it smuggled through the Treaty of Lisbon, by executive cabal, after the text had already been rejected by French and Dutch voters in its earlier guise. It is one thing to advance the Project by stealth and the Monnet method, it is another to call a plebiscite and then to override the outcome."

That is pretty obvious, but it will even become clearer if Britain permits. The outcomes of the experiment, on the other hand are clear.

"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. The only people that are ever blamed are the victims.

There has been no truth and reconciliation commission for the greatest economic crime of modern times. We do not know who exactly was responsible for anything because power was exercised through a shadowy interplay of elites in Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels, and Paris, and still is. Everything is deniable. All slips through the crack of oversight.

Nor have those in charge learned the lessons of EMU failure. The burden of adjustment still falls on South, without offsetting expansion in the North. It is a formula for deflation and hysteresis. That way lies yet another Lost Decade.

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'tat in a strict legal sense but certainly by skulduggery?"

How is it that after the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Magna Carta, Europe would turn and march back into the antediluvian? 

"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."

No sane man, or nation would stand for this, yet Britain stands evenly split!? The argument for is that staying would possibly avoid a minor recession, and make trade, foreign policy, and movement easier. Clemens was correct, "History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes." Yes, the quote is probably apocryphal. 

"But if we opt to leave, let us not delude ourselves. Personally, I think the economics of Brexit are neutral, and possibly a net plus over 20 years if executed with skill. But it is nothing more than an anthropological guess, just as the Treasury is guessing with its cherry-picked variables.

We are compelled to make our choice at a treacherous moment, when our current account deficit has reached 7pc of GDP, the worst in peace-time since records began in 1772 under George III. 

We require constant inflows of foreign capital to keep the game going, and are therefore vulnerable to a sterling crisis if foreigners lose confidence."

Agreed, in  the long term Brexit is superior, in the short it is not. But the second part is a thinly veiled reference to the US revolution, and perhaps the modern final filleting of Great Britain with potential losses of Wales, Scotland, North Ireland, and possibly others. These are precarious times. 

"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.

Without rehearsing well-known risks, we have a Jihadi cauldron across much of the Levant and North Africa; 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.

The Leave campaign was caught off guard when Barack Obama swept into London to make it the US view brutally clear, followed by Japan's Shinzo Abe, and a troop of world leaders. You do not unpick the web of interlocking global ties lightly."

The progressives in power in the US today want nothing so much as powerless nations, run by large undemocratic regional governments. These are much easier to deal with than myriad fractious governments. And since the Euro-authoritarian socialists are sisters in political ideation to the American progressives, they find many commonalities. The even extends to Putin's Russia with its even deeper strongman authoritarianism. Obama, and Clinton would both like nothing more than authoritarian regional powers controlling the serfs, making governance by international oligarchy possible.

This is a dystopian future.

"Remainers invoke Edmund Burke and the doctrine of settled practice, but settled is the one thing the EU has not been in its irrepressible itch for treaties and its accretion of power, and Burke is a double-edged sword. 

He backed the American Revolution, not to create something dangerously daring and new, but rather to restore lost liberties and self-government, the settled practice of an earlier age. Americans of all people should understand why a nation may wish to assert its independence."

Americans should, but do not, the Declaration of Independence is all but unknown today, its import lost on the dim uneducated cattle which low melodiously in the halls of Congress, and the executive. Our children, have no idea what the Declaration means, and only the most rudimentary knowledge of the words. 

The greatest document in the modern political world, and it is all but unknown, mostly because it so directly opposes the goals of the progressives to create a modern international oligarchy. One would think the opposing party would aggressively address this issue but they also are progressives, and only have a slightly different progressive vision of the world. 

If Brexit loses I suspect Evans-Prichard will be correct.

"Where we concur is that the EU as constructed is not only corrosive but ultimately dangerous, and that is the phase we have now reached as governing authority crumbles across Europe.

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.

"They are slowly drained of what makes them democratic, by a gradual process of internal decay and mounting indifference, until one suddenly notices that they have become something different, like the republican constitutions of Athens or Rome, or the Italian city-states of the Renaissance," says Lord Sumption of our Supreme Court."

All of Europe has always believed itself the continuation of Empire Rome, and so Europe had the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon's French Empire, the British Empire, the Russian Empire, the Third Reich, to name but a few. The EU stands as the last of these, an attempt to build empire, to control the hoi polloi, and to create power. 

The United States chose differently, we chose republic. We chose liberty over serfdom. We chose the hard life of the freeman, over the impoverished but more secure life of the serf. 

Good luck Britain, the fate of Europe lies in your hands. Choices must be made, nations will rise or fall based on this decision. Choose wisely.