EU's Freedom Deficit

Fire of Liberty

As the President returns to his regular schedule in the US, the people of Europe continue to march down the road known as the EU. While various potentates, presidents and prime ministers of Europe continue to prattle on about the goodness of the EU and urge the acceptance of the EU Constitution, the citizenry continues to cede their freedoms and soverignty away to a bureaucratic superstate run by a gaggle of elites. The more and more I read and hear about the EU, I continue to think of F.A. Hayek's book The Constitution of Liberty and his warnings against a people being immersed into a super-state like the one envisioned by the talking heads in Brussels.

Another individual who clearly sees the emergence of this new Leviathan within Europe is Janet Daley of The Daily Telegraph. In her recent opinion piece, Daley revealed how Europe has gone down a path that's miles away from the "classical liberal" societes of John Locke, John Stewart Mill and Edmund Burke. Europe seems to have dismissed notions like government of the people and insists on it being people of the government. Time has eroded the ideals of Liberty and Freedom within Europe and is slowly ushering in a monolithic nanny-state thus removing the people from the equation . I think Daley put it best when she wrote the following passage:

But it is too late now. Europe has had disillusionments too great to permit a return to that purist belief in the transforming power of democratic institutions. What was left standing in the ruins of the Bonapartist experiment was effectively demolished by the two world wars. The people - with nothing but the raw franchise - will never be allowed to run amok again. Europeans cannot be trusted to govern themselves. Their affairs will be administered by an EU oligarchy. And if they do not trust their own populations, European leaders are scarcely going to support handing out freedom to anarchic tribal societies that scarcely know what the right to vote is for. (Never mind that the only way to learn the value of democracy is to practise it.)

I guess the Europeans will continue to drift listlessly down the river of ruin until its too late to prevent an impending doom. Too many Americans have fought and died on the shores and plains of Europe to ensure the spread of Freedom and Liberty not the creation of an illeberal super-state.I hope the people in Britian will wise up a vote no on the EU Constitutiion and place a wooden stake in this construct's heart.