EU: How It Hits Our Pockets - Hard!

The costs of EU membership are of two types, the 'direct cost' (i.e., what our country, nearly entirely our government, pays directly to the EU institutions to comply with the treaties) and the 'indirect costs' (i.e., the costs of lost output because of the burden of regulation, the costs in terms of lost consumption because we cannot buy and sell in the world market to our best advantage because of EU protectionism, and what I call 'the miscellaneous insults', such as fines from the European Court of Justice). It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the indirect costs are larger – much larger – than the direct costs. That is one message of my analysis of the costs of the EU, but I am far from being alone in reaching this conclusion.  Prof. Tim Congdon.