The UK must leave the EU on October 31
I have increasingly often written that there can be too much of a good thing and that I despise extreme positions. This would apply to dogmatism as well, and while one should remain strong in one’s convictions, the ability to change one’s mind is also a virtue worth striving for, in my view. I personally have clear, strong, high-conviction opinions, but I also believe I should change my mind with the passage of time and the arrival of new experiences, let alone when the facts change.
I have quite consistently believed that the June 2016 referendum on the UK’s continuing membership in the European Union was a dreadful mistake from its conception. I am not a fan of referenda in the first place, and I do not believe the British public was sufficiently well informed when it made its narrow choice. In any event, as I often say, in this type of situations I must accept the environment as it is, and not as I wish it were. The agony and long-run political drama the UK electorate has been subjected to for well over three years must end as soon as possible.
I will say it one final time. I wish the UK was not leaving the EU, either that the referendum would not have happened in the first place, that it would have gone the other way, that the electorate would have sent a clear signal to the politicians that it wanted a ‘do-over’ or something that would have prevented what now seems increasingly unavoidable. Still, that is not the environment we actually have, and we must play the hand we have been dealt with.
The British people seem to be as divided on Brexit as ever, and if there were to be a second referendum (which I no longer believe there will be), the result would still be quite close (in one direction or the other). Exiting the European Union will certainly be no panacea, but the time has come to let the British people have finality on the issue.
Let the long run determine whether Brexit is a mistake or not
While still believing that the Brexit referendum and its outcome was a mistake, who am I to judge, and let’s have the fullness of time have the final verdict. It will be incumbent on the British people, other market participants and policymakers to strive to make the best of the new situation. Whether Brexit ends up actually being a success or a failure for the British people will hinge to a meaningful extent on their ability to implement and accept significant reforms as a result of the major change. Brexit, thus, is at the same time risk and an opportunity.
Many of the ‘promises’ that were made in connection with the 2016 referendum are unlikely to be kept, but a ‘more sovereign’ UK will obviously have more leeway to determine its own future course. The US administration has dangled the carrot of expedited trade agreement negotiations. I can think of many other opportunities (as well as risks) likely to come the way of the Brits. Let us all have the patience to see what reality delivers, and whether they make the best of the opportunities that for sure will come along with the peril (much of which has been widely discussed, so I will not get into that here).
As for the rest of the EU, the departure of the UK also brings a set of new risks and opportunities. It has been the conventional wisdom that the British, at the margin, brought to the EU more free-market thinking. In my (admittedly biased) opinion, that was a good thing. Not unlike every other human institution, the European Union is deeply flawed and in need of meaningful reform. The British departure should act as a wake-up call for the EU to improve (rather than get more set in its ways).
If Brexit is to set an example for any other members that otherwise may consider leaving, it will probably depend on the future long-term relative performance of the UK vs. the EU. Competition is positive in the long run, and time will tell if the UK sets an example to follow, or one not to follow. I am a long-term believer in free markets, free international trade and commerce, the more competition, the better, and that the best practices win in the long run.
Hoping (and actually expecting) global best practices to win out in the long run
Again, patience is necessary, and we will only know in the fullness of time. I increasingly believe that, as is the case with evolution, natural selection also takes place in the case of ideas and even cultural traits. The free market of ideas selects the long-term winners and losers. Further, I believe we continue to see global long-term convergence as growing parts of the world embrace the global best practices. Recent ‘counter-trend corrections’ to what is a secular trend towards globalization is an issue I plan to research in the future. In this view, a growing share of humanity is to embrace the global best practices in the free market of ideas and cultural traits.
Part of a related debate is the dismissal of the proverbial ‘homo economicus’, the Homo Sapiens that acts in a perfectly rational way when it comes to economic matters. Indeed, there are probably no single specimens of a completely economically-rational human being. However, in the aggregate, I do believe humans make the best long-term economic choices.
In a way similar to the ‘jelly bean count guessing’ at the county fair, while any single individual guess will be way off the mark, in the aggregate, the bigger the crowd the more likely that a reasonably close guess will be made as to how many jelly beans actually are (in the jar visible at the entrance for visitors to provide their best estimate of the number of beans it contains). This is also why democracy works long term, and what has made the US so successful, again, in the long run.
The Brexit referendum concluded Leave, and a snap election would probably too
I fully grasped my own bias when I started calling for a second referendum on Brexit. I am fundamentally against referenda. If that is the case, why would I want yet another one? While I do not yet quite buy into the argument that not going through with Brexit would be antidemocratic, I do see an important contradiction to my own beliefs and convictions on continuing to advocate for delays or another referendum on Brexit.
Again, the 2016 referendum was itself biased, mired in lies and false arguments on both sides, and suffered from low turnout (particularly from the young who will live the longest after Brexit, let alone the many hundreds of thousands of new voters who have turned 18 since June 2016 who did not have their say). As far as I know, contrary to Switzerland, the UK does not have frequent referenda as an integral part of its democratic process. All that said, and despite the slim margin, the Brits who participated in the 2016 referendum did vote by a majority to leave the EU.
Despite of ‘undemocratic’ acts and accusations on both sides of the argument in recent weeks and months, more conventional British political procedures would most likely result in a decision to leave the UK all the same. The opposition to Prime Minister Boris Johnson is fractured enough so that if there were to be a snap election with enough time before October 31, he would probably win and push through Brexit, as he has promised.
I also caught myself hoping that Johnson’s wish for a snap election is not granted. This, I realized, amounted to little more than hoping for a Brexit delay, and for more time for the opposition to coalesce in a way that would deliver an outcome very different from what the polls indicate. All this made me realize that, just because of my own personal preference for a different outcome, I was rooting for a path for the Brits different from what they appear to want for themselves (if by probably only the slimmest of majorities). It is, in my own new view, time to just move forward.
