Brexit or Breaksit?

[Labster]

I am going to ask a hypothetical question here, what happens if you are wrong?

Seriously,  say there is a hard Brexit and all this doom and gloom that the globalists are predicting fails to occur.

I mean, the entire point of Britain being in the EU was for ease of economic deals like the old NAFTA and part of their argument for Brexit is that Brussels is making more and more policy demands on Britain to include that they take in the middle eastern refugees that have flooded Europe. Where does the EU have the right to make such a demand? That is not a trade agreement, that's policy, and unless Brussels now sets government policy for something that is supposed to be about free trade then the Brits have every right to tell them to go hang.

This is actually a legit question, though.  It is quite possible that a solo Britain will do better economically in the long term.  In the medium term, creating an independent economy will cause pain, but birth is always a painful process.

In the short term, though, I don't think anyone can argue that the current process is not a shambles.  The market has agreed, as far as that goes.  I tend to focus on that in my posts, because it's fun to criticize governments (and the US/UK relationship is such that we know criticizing the government is not a grievance against the country itself).

I am a globalist, though.  I believe in the U.S. Constitution, and the vast, open-border duty-free zone it enabled across the North American continent.  I agree with BlackAeronaut -- confederations seem nice in theory, but in practice it's kind of a sweet spot for inefficiency in the capitalist era.  Not enough independence to allow for true specialization or social homogeny, nor integrated enough to make central fiscal policy effective.  Of the options on the other side, I believe that countries that embraced free trade and open borders have done better economically than those that did not, such as the U.S.S.R.

And I also believe that wanting free trade without free migration is morally dubious, because it means that we value possessions more than people.  This is the EU position, for the most part.  The U.S. has had internal open borders for more than 200 years, and aside from a few instances like the Okies or Bleeding Kansas, it's been pretty much conflict-free.  (You could argue that the Civil War was about forced migration policies but that's pretty far afield from the sorts of modern problems that could arise.)  Cases where refugee migration was refused are now looked back with disdain, like when we closed our ports to Jews seeking refuge from the Nazis.  I assume the current treatment of refugees will be judged similarly, and future Americans will have every reason to curse me and the rest of Americans for our sins.