[_9MOTHER9HORSE]

> I'd wager most not just don't know what it offers but don't even really know what exactly is bad about it.

This is a good reason why the EU should fail, and why people voted for Brexit, which will hopefully go some way to making that happen.

To the average citizen, the EU is a gargantuan bureaucracy, burning through enormous sums of money, whose main concern seems to be churning out reams of incomprehensible regulations. It also has some courts that overrule our national governments from time to time.

I like the concept of a more integrated Europe, but the EU is just the first attempt at it.

[DasIch]

To the average citizen the majority of regulation is incomprehensible because it deals with things they never have to deal with. I care that the food I buy is safe not precisely how regulation and standardization makes it so or that I personally understand it. The entire point of representative democracy is that I don't have to.

The vast amount of "regulation" is simply standardization to simplify trade in the single market. The industries affected themselves tend to want it even while people make fun of it in the media.

The amount of money invested in the EU is really not all that enormous, besides it's not like it disappears in a black hole. It seems like any significant infrastructure project in the EU gets at least some EU funding. Especially Eastern Europe has benefitted greatly from that and we all benefit as the East catches up with the rest of Europe.

In any case you can't just scrap the EU and start fresh and instantly come up with the perfect solution. This is not how politics and policy works or has ever worked. Any non-trivial system is built iteratively through incremental improvement, especially large systems. A more integrated Europe is achieved by improving the EU not by replacing it with some fantasy that will never come to fruition.