When they try to come up with "tangible" "benefits" for citizens they usually turn out rather daft.
And this is probably by design, too. With the emphasis on subsidiarity and proportionality (everything should be done at the closest level to the citizen that is both practical and effective) most of what impacts the average citizen is done at the local or national level.
And I am not sure that's a bad thing, either: I'm a Spanish Federalist, not a French Centralist.
Can I ask again for a Swiss case-study diary? (Confederacy, local sovereignty, direct democracy) A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
Local benefits are disconnected from the supranational institutions and systems, but local negatives are blamed by national institutions on the supranational, because it is easy, gets them off the hook, and 'who is going to check anyway?'
There are massive benefits realised by the redistribution of EU funding to underdeveloped regions or areas undergoing industrial transition. There are huge benefits in EU wide standardization and consumer protection. There are also large mistakes made (biofuels, paper reuse etc etc) but no worse than the mistakes that national government regularly make.
The greatest benefit of the EU IMO is the sharing of diversity, of finding out there are many solutions. The existence of a better way of doing things in one country, can be a benefit to all countries.
That is what ET does on a minor scale - the sharing of diversity in solutions and the origination of imaginative solutions. If only ET could be scaled up!
But that would not solve the communication problem. We also share in a style of language and presentation that does not appeal widely. ET is not consumer-ready, and perhaps should never be. But, as we have often discussed, the concepts and presentations developed here do need to reach audiences outside ET. And there are many audiences, each requiring a different type of communication style and content. You can't be me, I'm taken
We also share in a style of language and presentation that does not appeal widely. ET is not consumer-ready, and perhaps should never be.
It would indeed be strange and no doubt frustrating if we were to speak to each other here in soundbites and ad slogans. Do you think a discussion forum of any interest is also going to have wide appeal?
This is not in defence of an exclusive, elitist yadda yadda watering-hole for intellectuals. Just that it's not the job of a community discussion blog to handle direct mainstream communication. That's a whole other job on its own. When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
There's the message, the messenger and the passenger. All 3 need to be discussed and correlated imo. But as I said, there are no clear reasons why ET has to be consumer-ready. You can't be me, I'm taken
