The Brussels Behemoth Isn’t Just a Conservative Fever-Dream

In a 2016 interview, Daniel Hannan, an MP in the European Parliament, offered the following criticism of the UK’s continued membership in the European Union:

Quote :: The economic price is not just the £19bn gross (£10bn net) that we hand to Brussels every year—enough to build and equip a state-of-the-art NHS hospital every week. It also takes the form of the regulatory burden that falls on our businesses, especially smaller firms…for we pay both a democratic price and an economic price. The democratic price is that laws are handed down by institutions that no one elects… European commissioners are immune to public opinion, invulnerable to the ballot box.

His attack against over-regulation by Brussels as both an economic drag and a violation of representative democracy neatly echoes conservative and libertarian lamentations over the administrative state on this side of the pond. Far from a Madisonian republic in which the legislative branch “necessarily predominates”, the U.S. Congress has delegated sweeping grants of authority to the executive branch, thereby derogating its constitutional role as the creator of law (with apologies to Randy Barnett and his natural law fellow-travelers). Far from the canard of three “co-equal” branches, the original constitutional ambition was to establish a legislative branch and two derivative branches to respectively execute and exposit the former’s output.

The Brussels Behemoth Isn’t Just a Conservative Fever-Dream Decisions_stock

The Brussels Behemoth Isn’t Just a Conservative Fever-Dream Decisions_stock

https://www.cato.org/blog/brussels-behemoth-isnt-just-conservative-fever-dream

The Brussels Behemoth Isn’t Just a Conservative Fever-Dream

The Brussels Behemoth Isn’t Just a Conservative Fever-Dream

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