The EU has to solve complex coordination problems. To a large extent technocratic answers ARE what's needed. And we know that the public simply does not care to enter into complex issues - they always vote for the demagogue over the technocrat/the wonk (the guy you'd have beer with).

I do not have a problem with technocratic solutions. What I have a problem with is that those technocratic solutions are incorporated into the same document that regulates the functioning of the technocrats that make them. For instance, what in the name of the Union are articles on preventing fraud and organizing an inner market doing in the same text as clauses on citizenship and separation of powers? What prevents us from making a nice, clean constitution that covers the establishment of a set of institutions and the powers vested in them without having a hundred and fifty-odd pages of riders concerning specific policies?

Then we could discuss the specifics of those institutions and the specifics of the attached bill of rights without getting bogged down in meaningless details that are important only because they are given the force of constitutional law. I noticed that the original treaty imposed a blanket ban on reproductive cloning, for one thing - how does that belong in a bill of rights? That's a discussion I'd have loved to have had without having to give an up-or-down vote on simultaneously encasing twenty or thirty specific policies.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.