Trying to find a Brexit silver lining.
A horrible decision, the British economy will suffer, as will EU economies. There will be some financial instability around the world, nobody can predict how bad it will be anywhere, but it won't be good. Since a big part of the push was xenophobia and anti-immigration, it gives momentum to that kind of ugliness -- in the Netherlands the anti-immigrant party is calling for a similar referendum right now. And it also threatens the "European experiment".
Here's another thing. Even though it was anti-immigration driving this, it wouldn't have worked if the EU and also the UK government hadn't made such a mess of things economically. Granted, a lot of the blame goes back to the US which caused the financial crisis which started the whole chain of events leading us here, but still, Europe ****ed it up with the austerity push.
Another thing. Brexit was one of the rare instances where economists across the board agreed it was bad. People didn't listen. But can you blame them? We live in a world where Larry Kudlow is considered an economic authority. Where if you don't want environmental regulations, you stick a suit on someone and put them on TV pretending to be a scientist. And where the EU leaders have been screwing over the people there based on a strident austerity-based economic ideology.
"Elites" get a bad name, but we do need them. In all kinds of places. We need medical elites to tell us what will actually make us healthy and what is snake oil. We need engineering elites to tell us whether buildings are going to fall down or not. And we need economic elites to stop us from doing dumb things like Brexit.
So maybe, just maybe, this will start to wake economic elites up to the fact that they can't be this incompetent and greedy. Because here's the deal, elites. You can have a world that's pretty close to what we've had for the last decade or two. Which is a pretty good deal for y'all. CEOs can still be rich, entrepreneurs can become billionaires, even 28-year-old bond traders can drive around like douchebags in Ferraris. But you just can't squeeze every last dime out of the working and middle classes anymore. Or things like this start to happen, which hurts everyone.
So cut the austerity and start redistributing the wealth. Not only is that fairer, it is also more economically sound -- inequality at these levels starts to dampen growth. But even if elites don't care about fairness, maybe they will realize that it is in their own interest to make things fairer because if they don't level the field, then they end up with things like Brexit. Or, god forbid, Donald Trump.
= new reply since forum marked as read
