Finally, the European Union admits that the EU is a cost

Everything has costs and benefits, everything. To refuse to admit that is to refuse the basic insights of economics. Thus there are costs to being inside the European Union, costs to being in alignment with it. True, there will also be benefits, it’s the balance of the two that matters.

This is not some weird ultra position, this is what the EU itself is telling us:

The EU is making clear its bottom lines. It insists that the UK must accept alignment with its rules on workers’ rights, the environment and state aid, as the price for a deal (fearing that otherwise the UK will steal a competitive advantage).

It is only possible to gain, let alone steal, a competitive advantage if costs must be carried by one side and not the other. Thus this insistence, the very negotiating position of the EU, is that the rules on workers’ rights, the environment, state aid, are a cost that has to be carried by those who obey them.

The benefit here is the ability to export UK produced goods and services into the EU without facing tariffs and or quotas. This is the position they’ve laid out, this is not us making the statement, this is the EU itself.

The question to be answered is therefore whether those costs are worth that benefit?

One answer is that the real costs of such tariffs are carried by the consumers who pay them - the EU citizenry denied that tariff and quota free access to those things that the UK produces which they would like to have. Our position therefore becomes clear - those costs aren’t upon us so we should be free traders, pure and simple. We gain the benefits of not being constricted by the regulatory costs.

Even if we wish to, wrongly, insist that the exports are a benefit to us the costs of the regulations seem to be higher than the benefits of the exports. Otherwise why such worry that we might decide to jettison the regulations?

The correct negotiating stance therefore becomes clear. We wish to be free of the costs, those regulations. We’ll take as much of the benefits as we can, those exports. But it’s the being free of the constraints that is important.