[k__]

Is the EU really that bad?!

I had the feeling that they forced countries to do the right thing, for example granting human rights. Even here in Germany we had laws that let you lock up people forever.

What was the bad stuff that happend in the EU?

The "crisis" was mostly due to the "elected" governments of the countries which have now financial problems.

What the EU did in the last years was mainly telling "the people" that they elected a bunch of assholes that milked their countries dry.

[rahoulb]

The Remain campaign never made any positive points about staying in the EU (apart from a few in the Labour party talking about workers rights, but they got about 4% airtime and very little newspaper coverage). The vast majority of the Remain campaign was all about the terrible consequences of leaving.

The Leave campaign was a mix of fear of foreigners, fear of unaccountable bureaucracy and a vision of a Britain that had "taken back control".

The purely negative vision lost.

(There are also those that say that the Eurozone was doomed to failure because of the imbalances in the countries involved with no mechanisms to rectify those imbalances - making the fact that the EU stepped in and replaced two democratically elected governments an inevitability. So it engineered a bad situation then punished the losers in that situation for falling into it. But I don't know enough about economics to argue that point)

[nickik]

Maybe you should look up stuff like 'Vorratsdatenspeicherung'. The EU is literally demanding (and receiving) money from Germany because the haven't implemented this law yet. The reason they have not is that is was against the German constitution and it was rejected by the Bundesgerichtshof.

Now the law is coming back and a argument of the supporters is that its about EU integration and cost.

The law is very clearly against western principles, surveillance for everybody even if they did nothing.

This is just one example, the EU is used to push threw laws that can not get threw on National level and then get imposed top town.

The EU gets much better coverage then they deserve because people are into the idea of "Europe United, No War" but nobody really knows or cares much beyond that.

> The "crisis" was mostly due to the "elected" governments of the countries which have now financial problems.

Maybe you should look at this graph:

http://worthwhile.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451688169e20176155c5...

The left the question about debt open (legally) but gave the impression that it would be common. The market assumed so, and this provided false incentives for all the governments. When the debt was not common, as you can see, the bond yields spread again and some of the nations were not able to role over their debt.

Instead of fully committing to the idea of not sharing debt and letting Greece default, they don't allow that and keep Greece limping along. This is the worst of all ways because nobody knows what to expect form the EU.

The ECB has also not helped the case by conducting monetary policy so badly, that it has lead to something so bad that its only comparison is the the Great Depression. Their are multiple nations in Europe that are doing worse then they did in the GD. The GD on a global scale was far worse then what happened this time, but Europe is the outlier and that has mostly to do with the EMU and the ECB mismanagement.

Its unbelievably hard for Greece to service debt and reform while also having a NGDP that is dropping like crazy. No nation on the planet could deal with that. Greece is poor but they are not flexible, so going the forced price/wage deflation route is also not gone be easy (thats essentially what some of the Balics did).

To be fair to the ECB, even if they did do everything perfectly, they would still not be able to do a perfect job. Their is broad agreement about that in the research area of common currency zones. The problem of uniformity is quite real. Compare the NGDP of Germany and Greece. Germany in the same monetary union has a growing NGDP, the NGDP of Greece is lower then it was in 2008.

The EU and specially the EMU has totally disgraced the hole project of european union. Now the nations hate each other, calling "them" lazy or nazis in newspapers. When the project was mostly about Free Trade and Free Movement it was growing together.

Now we could get into a hole lot more issues such as the other horrible protectionist polices and the cartel enforcement that they do. Their are many other issues but this post is already to long.

tl:dr; The EU(specially EMU) is a horrible institution that is horribly managed in almost every way, specially everything that relates to economics.