Brexit and BullionVault
Wednesday, 6/01/2016 12:51
Democracy and prosperity make the case for voting to leave the EU...
PAUL TUSTAIN
– founder of BullionVault – reckons that in the short term Brexit will be bad for his company, because it will divert many new European customers.
But, in his private view, some things are more important than money...
Vote Leave, for democracy
Power corrupts. That's why Karl Popper (one of the great thinkers of the 20th century) argued that we shouldn't get too obsessed about how we put people into power, as long as we jealously guard our right to throw them out again.
Thankfully, in Britain, we are good at jettisoning stale governments – from both sides. We regularly change our national direction, against the prevailing government's wishes. Through exercising this right we have been able to stop our politicians veering to their chosen extreme, and we have kept British politics more or less in the centre ground, which is where the huge majority of British people want it.
But this is a power we do not have in Europe. There we only get to vote for people who don't matter; for the toothless MEPs you've never heard of, and to whom nobody listens, as their dozens of parliamentary factions argue amongst themselves and get nothing useful done.
Although we never saw it coming the European Union we now find ourselves inside is run by the European Commission. The Commission's power has become enormous, because it fills the gap left by the failed European Parliament. That leaves the unelected, executive arm of EU government in complete, effective control.
Can we change the direction the European Commissioners choose? Can we get rid of them? No, we cannot. EU Commissioners are appointed, not elected. Britain appoints just one out of 28 EU Commissioners. Those 28 call the shots by creating the European Commission Directives which we must all obey, even when they act directly against our national interest.
You are not anti-Europe if you vote to
Leave. Indeed your author considers himself a Europhile, not a xenophobe, and he likes a very great deal of what comes from Europe, including – in strict order of priority – his wife, a very large number of his customers,
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and
directive 98/80/EC.
But he likes liberty and democracy even more than he likes Europe, and the lessons of European history demand that we, the people, retain a practical capability of ejecting a government which steers us off course. Within the EU we simply don't have it.
After June 23rd, if we vote to
Remain, it will be too late. We will be stuck with whatever corrupted direction the European Commission chooses, and probably for at least a generation.
Could a European government really corrupt itself in a generation? You know it has in the past, and where better to start than by setting the salary of an appointed junior Commissioner at 250% of the salary of an elected MEP?
Leave.
Vote Leave, for prosperity
If there is a single economic lesson to be drawn from world history it is that free, independent people will work out a way to be more productive and more prosperous than controlled ones.
That's why all the economic arguments you have heard from
Remain are bogus. Those scare stories make the same mistake. They assume that if some modest privilege of EU membership is stripped away we will all stand there looking confused and lost.
Have we become so weak, so dependent, so scared of liberty and self-reliance?
No, we have not.
While seven years of stagnant data from Europe show us, yet again, that centralised control and regulation is the economic road to nowhere, here in Britain – if we
Leave – hundreds of thousands of inventive British people will be freed to do new things.
Of course we cannot tell you what those things will be. But we can say with great confidence, founded on 400 years of repeating history, that people freed from the oppressive straightjacket of regulated lives will innovate, produce, and grow their economies at many times the rate which our current partners in the EU are managing.
That's why, if we lead the way, others will soon follow.
It won't be the first time that Britain, standing alone, and with steadfast determination, ended up leading the rest of Europe back towards democracy, liberty and prosperity.
Leave.
Notes
1. The one that grants a right to a private life, and a private correspondence, and prevents future governments trawling through commercial data to see who they can profitably start persecuting. Note – however – that
under Article 8 the government rightfully retains the right to get a warrant from a judge to look at the records of a named individual who is already under investigation. Article 8 treads a sensible middle ground between total privacy and national security.
2. The one that insists that investment gold bullion
is a monetary asset and therefore cannot be subject to VAT.
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