First, the Irish, being as they are not team players, just had to run the Lisbon Treaty past their citizens, even though every other EU nation was smart enough to limit the decision to their respective elite Eurocrats. It turns out the Irish, upon reflection, aren’t too keen on ceding their remaining sovereignty to Brussels, as the treaty ratification was voted down with extreme prejudice.

As an American, albeit an unusually politically active one, I don’t have a very firm grasp on European politics, but I can’t help but compare the EU with the formation of my own country back in the late 18th century. The thirteen colonies were all pretty independent, and our first attempt to organize into a nation, the Articles of Confederation, failed due to an excessive lack of cohesion. The successor document, the Constitution, attempted to balance the sovereignty of the colonies with the need for a central government to perform certain functions. Thus, the Federal model.

It seems to me the EU have made the opposite mistake, trying to centralize authority over nearly 500 million people in one place, eroding the sovereignty of its member nations incrementally. The French and Dutch voters shot down the EU treaty back in ’05, an experience which I must imagine informed the decision to skip the whole referendum thing this time around. The Irish seem particularly hostile to this latest consolidation of power, and I don’t blame them. I constantly bristle under the runaway size, scope, authority, and cost of our central government, and it (used to) be severely constrained by Constitutional limits, and still is today compared to the EU experiment.

Anyway, good on the Irish for standing up to Eurocrat elites and holding on to their country for a little longer.

Contrast this with the seemingly limitless supply of meddlesome statist chicanery streaming out of the UK. Last week is was the shocking revelation that gun bans don’t in fact lead criminals away from crime for want of a tool, but instead forces recourse to edged weapons. This week it’s even better; bans on hat-wearing.

It seems the Brits are working up to the ultimate homage to Orwell in the form of a perpetual live-action production of 1984, a component of which is their absurd Panopticon. One problem though; some assholes wear hats, which makes it harder for the CCTV cameras to get a good shot of their faces. Solution? Why, government diktat of course. New rule: you can’t wear hats in pubs. QED.

I have to wonder what could possibly be wrong with the people who gave us Blackstone, Churchill, and Thatcher, that they seem happy to return their hard-won democratic gains and descend once more into subjugation, for nothing more than some mumbled assurances of safety and the greater good. What the hell is wrong with these people, and what must we as Americans do to avoid ending up like them?