During Friday’s bloodbath I heard a CNBC anchor lady assuring her (scant) remaining audience that Brexit wasn’t a big sweat. That’s because it is purportedly a political crisis, not a financial one.

Presumably in the rarified canyons of Wall Street, politics doesn’t matter much. After all, when things get desperate enough, Washington caves and does “whatever it takes” to get the stock averages moving upward again.

Here’s a news flash. That’s all about to change.

Following the success of the vote for Britain to withdraw from the European Union, many Americans renewed talk of the possibility of American states seceding from the United States. 

Last Thursday, the people of Britain voted in a referendum to leave the European Union (EU). Most commentators view Britain’s exit (“Brexit”) from the European Union as bad news for economic growth in the UK and the eurozone. As a result, it is argued, the growth rate in the rest of the world will be also badly affected.

It is more likely that, whether the pace of real economic growth over time will weaken or strengthen is going to be set by the pace of expansion in the pool of real wealth.

Yesterday, we looked at how the European Union functions on a model of “democracy” that is based on very large constituency sizes, thus reducing access to policymakers, and reducing the ability of ordinary taxpayers to influence the lawmaking process. (The more residents there are for each elected official, the larger the constituency size.)

On Tuesday, during a somewhat raucous session of the European parliament, Nigel Farage gave his post-Brexit “victory speech”. Besides his trademark taunting of his pro-EU colleagues, Mr Farage made an important point, suggesting:

[Editor’s Note: This essay is forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to the Makers of Modern Entrepreneurship (Routledge, 2017), edited by David B. Audretsch and Erik E. Lehmann.]

Few books have as misleading a title as Hard Choices. For Hillary Clinton, as this tedious memoir of her years as Secretary of State makes evident, there are no hard choices. The Solutions to all political and economic problems are easy. We must always rely on the directing hand of government, guided by the superior wisdom of our moral and intellectual betters, Hillary Clinton foremost among them.

Last week’s UK vote to leave the EU may have come as a shock to many, but the sentiment that led British voters to reject rule from Brussels is nothing unique. In fact it is growing sentiment worldwide. Frustration with politics as usual, with political parties that really do not differ in philosophy, with an economy that serves the one percent at the expense of the rest of society is a growing phenomenon throughout Europe and in the United States as well.

One of the biggest weaknesses in the EU’s argument against secession from the EU is the fact that the EU is so very undemocratic. Whatever one thinks of democracy, the fact remains that Europeans tend to favor it, so the EU’s significant deficit on democratic representation in EU institutions has been a big problem in selling the EU to the masses. The EU recognized this in the Brexit debate, which is why EU supporters have focused almost entirely on economic claims.