Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
Valid points. I also freely admit that I am only moderately familiar with the particulars of European trade deals and the like -- a good portion of it picked up here and from sources included by almost everyone in the backroom [sorry Frags].

I am always a fan of pruning back the bureaucracy, which tends to choke activity by well-intentioned accretion that stifles innovation and organizational flexibility. On the other hand, there is a percentage to whom it means scrap the safety regulations in the interest of profit, which is obviously pretty scummy. It takes care to prune back regulation without removing truly valuable safety and record-keeping components.

There is a reason that Marx was able to critique the unrestrained capitalism of the early Victorian era and good reasons that Weber felt traditional management systems were ineffective. Some measure of bureaucratic regulation IS needful because of that 5% of exploitative types who would gleefully pimp their parents if it added shekels to the next quarter's statement. Silly me, I am rather a fan of drinkable tap water.
The thing is, most of the criticised regulations are UK-driven rather than EU-driven. Where the EU really does add regulation is in the protection of regional specialities, protecting them from unregulated commercialisation that would use their names to label unrelated products. This can hurt national and multinational companies whose scope goes beyond a single region, but it protects regional small holders by allowing them and only them to use these labels. Funnily enough, it was exactly these areas whose commercial and infrastructure interests were protected by the EU that voted to leave the EU. And upon the Leave result, they immediately asked the UK government to safeguard them as the EU had done (fat chance). Idiots.