EU charge sheet

From the EU website:
 
The European Commission is the EU’s politically independent executive arm. It is alone responsible for drawing up proposals for new European legislation, and it implements the decisions of the European Parliament and the Council of the EU.

There is the key problem: the Commission alone can propose and consequently acts as a gatekeeper. Nor is it politically independent. The Commission appointments are made by politicians and the members are politicians; it is misleading to compare it to the British Civil Service. Add in multi-member constituencies and there is a built-in disconnection between individuals and their representatives.

The EEC was founded on the the principle of subsidiarity. In practice, subsidiarity was been ignored. The EU’s trade and economic policies neglect the basic principles of sound economic practice as they had been understood since before the end of the eighteenth century. Four blunders is an achievement: CAP, VAT (a condition for membership), putting a tariff wall around the Single Market, and the Euro. All four would have been recognised as the road to ruin by anyone with even a passing knowledge of the teachings of the Classical Economists: the French Physiocrats, Smith, Ricardo and J S Mill.

• The first two incarnations of CAP were absurd, with food mountains and drinks lakes, the present one - handouts to landowners - is a reverse Robin Hood scandal.
• There could be no worse tax than VAT; it fails all four of the Canons of Taxation, the long-established set of criteria for judging the soundness of a tax.
• Tariff barriers impoverish the many at to the benefit of the protected few and come with a heavy administrative cost.
• The Euro is a flawed conception. With financial and banking crises looming in Italy, Spain, Greece and Ireland, 2019 will probably see its demise in its present form; the likeliest outcome is that Germany will pull out. The Euro has given Germany an unrealistically undervalued currency which has given rise to persistent surpluses and unnecessarily high prices for German consumers and German manufacturers. The converse effect has adversely affected the peripheral countries of southern Europe. The absurd situation has now arisen that the German surpluses can only be lent to countries who are unlikely to be able to pay it back.

What we see is what one would expect when Ricardian principles of economics are ignored: overheating at the geographical core and depression at the periphery. The Cohesion Policy does little to address the issue. As Lady Bracknell said of lost parents, ‘To have one misconceived policy is a misfortune; to have a string of them like carelessness.’ That is a consistent pattern with the EU. It has, for example, been known for decades that VAT fraud is substantial and endemic, but never is there a suggestion that the basic concept of VAT is flawed and that a replacement should be sought. Is the EU, as an institution, incapable of learning anything?

https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/tax-cooperation-control/vat-gap_en

But even the well-intentioned policies go wrong in their execution or timing. The Directive on filament bulbs was imposed two years too soon, resulting in a heap of mercury-contaminated waste from the CF bulbs which were the only alternative at the time, when it was known that LED lighting would soon be available. In the railway industry, on which I keep a close watch, the European Railway Traffic Management System (ERTMS) project has been an inconclusive and expensive saga, promising much but delivering little. The Technical Standards for Interoperability (TSI) come with heavy compliance costs; the latest standards for electrification are an important reason why further electrification in the UK has been put on hold.

From another perspective, none of this is surprising. Government at all levels - and I have seen this from the inside - has a propensity for making bad decisions. Other considerations get in the way of good decisions. It is for this reason that the less government, and the fewer levels of government, the better. At each level of government, there are key services which only government can provide. You could say that the function of government is to prevent people from treading on each others’ toes and keeping sharks and snakes under control, but they are far fewer than those in which government gets involved in.

There is indeed a legitimate function for a continent-wide level of government such as the EU, but it is not the dirigiste organisation it has become.