Why You Should Be Glad Britain Voted for Brexit
Britain's historic referendum on its membership in the European Union ended early on Friday morning with a clear result: 52 percent of the British people, a margin of more than 1.2 million voters, wanted to exit the E.U. Brexit is a reality, and, as a result, Prime Minister David Cameron, who led the campaign to keep Britain in, has resigned.
To listen to the intelligentsia scream about this, you would think that Britain has done something dangerous. But Britain's going to stay in NATO. It's not going isolationist. It's not going to stop buying, selling and investing around the world.
What it is going to start doing is controlling its own borders, making its own trade agreements and writing its own rules. Inside the E.U., it couldn't do any of those things. After it completes its departure from the E.U., it can.
In other words, it's going to be doing exactly what the United States does. That's all. Britain doesn't have to be in the E.U. to sell goods to Europe. After all, the U.S. isn't part of the E.U., and we sell a lot to Europe. If the E.U. is ready, as Britain will be, to negotiate in good faith, they can find reasonable ways to deal with other issues.
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Of course, the E.U. may want to try to punish Britain for leaving. If they do that, they'll hurt everyone, themselves included. And if that's the road they choose, it makes the E.U. seem less like a voluntary union of free democracies and more like a mafia family.
Defenders of Britain's E.U. membership argue that Britain needs to stay in, because only it can force the E.U. to move toward a freer market. As one commentator put it, if Britain leaves, "The block of more market-orientated counties ... will shrink from 35 percent to 20 percent. ... All the future rules that affect the tech industry are much more likely to be more restrictive."
Got that? Britain's in the minority as a market-orientated country inside the E.U. Therefore, it needs to stay in the E.U. so it can be outvoted, instead of leaving and having its own rules for its own tech sector, its financial sector and the rest of its industry.
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Why does that make any sense? If the E.U. wants to have bad rules, it can. And it will pay the price for them. Maybe it will learn from the consequences. In any case, this isn't a problem Britain can fix, and it doesn't need to try.
The arguments in favor of Britain's E.U. membership always come down to a few silly claims. There's the one about how Britain can't do it. But Britain is a decent, tolerant place, with a long history of governing itself as an independent nation. Of course it can do it.
Then there's the one about how the E.U. will be worse off if Britain leaves. No doubt, losing Britain is a big deal. But if the E.U. valued Britain so much, it should have shown more interest in now-former Prime Minister Cameron's effort to renegotiate the U.K.'s membership. And the E.U.'s friends should stop excusing all its flaws by blaming Britain for leaving because of them.
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What this panic is all about is pretty simple. As one distraught Europhile said to me, "This vote was decided by the man in the corner pub." Yeah, that's why they call it democracy: Because the people get to govern themselves. Far too much of the hand-wringing comes down to the tired old argument that we, the few, the metropolitan elite, know best.
Well, I don't think the people are always right. And it's our privilege in a democracy to disagree with the results of referenda. But I'd like that disagreement to be based on something other than disdain. Because, actually, the people, especially in Britain, have a pretty good track record.
And that's why we should be glad that Britons had the courage to think for themselves, to come to their own conclusions and not just accept what they were told. Because that's not just their system. It's our system, too.
Sent from my iPhone
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