What Brexit Is All About: Taxation (and Regulation) Without Representation…(WoW! Just Like Us!!)
By: Frank Holmes
GoldSeek.com
Tuesday, 21 June 2016
I want to continue the Brexit conversation from last week. With only three days left before U.K. voters head to the polls, expectations of which side might win are beginning to shift toward the “Brexiteers,” while betting markets are still putting money on the “stay” campaign. However, the probability of victory for those who favor keeping their European Union membership has weakened rather remarkably in the last month, falling from over 80 percent in mid-May to around 62 percent today, according to BCA Research.
One of the main grievances is the burden of EU regulations, which are decided by unelected officials in Brussels with little to no cost-benefit analysis. These rules, which regulate everything from the number of hours someone can work (48 hours) to vacuum cleaner power, ultimately stifle growth and innovation.
Consider the so-called FANG stocks—Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. These four tech behemoths, not to mention Apple, rank among the most disruptive, transformative companies the world has ever seen. They also happen to be American. Nothing like them exists in Europe—or, for that matter, anywhere else across the globe.
When’s the last time a major scientific or technological breakthrough was made in France? In Germany? Where’s Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley?
It’s not that these countries lack capable thinkers and entrepreneurs. Far from it. Europe was once at the center of everything, from science to music to business. But now that Piketty-style “envy economics” reign supreme in the EU, innovation has increasingly shifted west toward the U.S.
And it doesn’t end there. EU officials continually try to make demands on how these companies conduct their business, whether that be regulating Amazon and Netflix’s original streaming content or suing Facebook over privacy issues.
These are among the questions and concerns Brexiteers and Eurosceptics are bringing to the fore. And no matter the referendum’s outcome, they’re not likely to go away any time soon. In fact, this could very well be the beginning and should serve as a wakeup call to EU policymakers. Just as American colonists protested taxation without representation over 240 years by dumping an entire shipment of English tea into Boston Harbor, many Brits today are staging their own taxpayers’ revolt by demanding control over their own economy, budgeting, immigration policies and more.
The Rest…HERE
