Get Your Heads Out of Your Asses: Why the EU Gives You More Freedom Than Your Bitcoin Dreams Ever Will

Puedes leer la versión en castellano aquí.

Look, I understand the rage. Institutions feel distant, opaque, corrupt. You watch libertarian tech-bro videos, blockchain evangelists, crypto maximalists telling you that sovereignty means you alone, that governments are corrupt parasites, your money gets wasted on bureaucratic slugs, and regulations ruin your gravy train ride. Fine. I’m angry, too—in Spain, I make an average salary being self-employed and almost half of my money goes to taxes, and I have to ask: where the hell is all that money going?

My health care gets worse every year; my pension plan is a joke I’ll probably never see. So trust me, if private health or private pension “cost less” were real, I'd be all for it. But it's not, and a few economics professors-turned-podcasters won't convince me otherwise. It shouldn't take much to realize the U.S. model is ugly, cruel, monopolistic, and bankrupting, but misdirected rage blinds people from thinking rationally and compassionately.

We all need to break out of our narrow echo chambers. The EU is no saint. But it already gives you more freedom than Bitcoin will ever deliver—and it can evolve, not collapse.

Below is my manifesto: what the EU has done (often invisibly), what it should improve, how libertarian and crypto ideas can fuse with a European project, and what real damage a collapse would cause.

What the EU Already Does (and what most people never credit)

Let me lay it out—the scaffolding behind your life you often don’t see.

• It has kept peace in Europe for over 70 years—a continent that tore itself apart twice in half a century. The EU (and its predecessor, the European Coal and Steel Community) was literally built to make war between France and Germany “not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible."
  Since 1945, no two EU member states have gone to war against each other—an unprecedented record in European history.
• The Single Market—the legal, regulatory, and standards integration that allows you to buy, sell, hire, invest, and move with far fewer barriers across 27 countries. In fact, economists estimate it boosted real GDP per capita by 12–22 % over time versus a counterfactual without it. European Central Bank
• It enforces shared democratic values—through the Copenhagen criteria, all members must maintain the rule of law, free elections, human rights, and minority protections.
• It guarantees free movement of people, goods, services, and capital — meaning you can live, work, study, and travel anywhere across 27 countries without a visa. That’s not just a luxury for Erasmus students—it’s the foundation of actual individual sovereignty across borders.
• It protects consumers from corporate abuse through legislation like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which became the global gold standard for digital rights. Big Tech platforms still fight and lobby against these regulations because they give users, not companies, control over their own data.
• It’s the largest humanitarian aid donor in the world—providing billions to combat global poverty, support climate adaptation, and stabilize conflict regions. When the U.S. pulls out of global agreements, it’s often the EU that keeps the lights on.
• It’s a global climate leader—the European Green Deal and Fit for 55 package aim to make the EU carbon-neutral by 2050—one of the most ambitious frameworks on Earth.
• It promotes worker rights and social protections—the European Pillar of Social Rights ensures minimum standards for fair wages, gender equality, and work–life balance.
• It preserves cultural diversity—funding through Creative Europe supports translation, arts, heritage, and small cultural industries across the continent—a rare example of state-backed pluralism.
• Consumer protections: product safety, airline and train passenger rights, rights to refunds/returns, cross-border guarantees. Every time you return a shitty gadget, thank Brussels.
• Roam-like-at-home: no extra mobile roaming fees inside the EU. That’s a direct benefit for heavy travellers, digital nomads, and kids studying abroad.
• Recognition of professional credentials: doctors, engineers, architects—your qualifications can often move across borders with fewer national-level revalidation barriers.
• EU funding for local stuff: cohesion funds, regional development, infrastructure grants, R&D funding to universities & startups.
• Horizon Europe / research grants: collaborative scientific funding that ties EU labs across states.
• Trade deals and external tariff union: small firms don’t negotiate 27 trade treaties; the EU does.

All this already constrains and protects your life in ways we often dismiss as “bureaucracy.”

What People Take for Granted (the Invisible Benefits)

These are the things you lose first if you pull the thread and unravel the EU.

• Paying roaming surcharges.
• Having to learn 27 different consumer-rights regimes when you buy something from Germany or Poland.
• Fragmented research funding or labs cut off from European consortia.
• No unified digital identity or interoperability in e-services across borders.
• Virtually no ability for regulators in one country to stop pollution or environmental damage from crossing borders.
• Losing cross-border labour mobility: students, remote workers, consultants.
• The disappearance of scale in negotiating power: small states being bullied in trade deals.
• You'll no longer go through passport checks within seconds without being treated like you're on a most-wanted list. This is why I avoid going through the USA at all costs.

These are defaults. Remove them, and all of a sudden, life becomes a logistical nightmare for any business or individual trying to cross borders.

Flaws of the EU—and real, actionable fixes (not platitudes)

Yes, the EU has serious flaws. But complaining without reform goals is just noise.

1. Democratic deficit/institutional remoteness

• Flaw: Many decisions come via the Commission or Council, often hidden from public awareness or scrutiny.
• Fix: Stronger transparency rules (publish all meetings, lobby logs, ex-official cooling-offs), expand European parliamentary oversight of implementing regulation, local translation of EU decisions—require that every major EU regulation be explained in each member state’s local media with cost/benefit breakdowns.

2. Fiscal asymmetry: monetary union, no fiscal union

• Flaw: The eurozone shares a currency and central bank, but weak shared fiscal shock absorbers (no central euro treasury).
• Fix: Create a permanent eurozone fiscal capacity (rainy-day fund/stabilization budget). Fully operationalize the Banking Union + common deposit insurance (phased). Use conditional investment funds co-managed at EU + national level.

3. Migration & asylum burden-sharing breakdowns

• Flaw: Crises like 2015 saddled frontline states (Greece, Italy) with disproportionate inflows. Backlash fuels Euroscepticism.
• Fix: Enforceable relocation quotas, EU asylum agency capacity ramp-up, legal migration pathways, invest in external border partnerships and processing hubs, and faster decisions.

4. Lobbying, capture, opaque access

• Flaw: Big lobbies (Big Tech, Big Ag) dominate Brussels corridors; registration is weak.
• Fix: Legally binding transparency register, make informal meetings public, better penalties for violations, and strong ethics watchdogs.

5. Regulatory slowness, technocratic inertia

• Flaw: Good law/intent, but slow execution, overcautious drafting, lagging behind tech cycles.
• Fix: Regulatory sandboxes for AI/crypto/fintech, fast-track procedures for strategic priorities, public-private pilot partnerships.

6. Rule-of-law inconsistency

• Flaw: In some states, constitutional capture or backsliding happens (judicial interference, media suppression).
• Fix: Clear automatic triggers for conditionality, structural reform grants, judicial safeguards, and peer review enforcement.

7. Burden of red tape on SMEs

• Flaw: All the regulation is designed for big players; small producers suffer disproportionately.
• Fix: SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprise) carve-outs/the separation of a specific business unit from a parent company to operate as a new, often smaller, independent entity, which can then be sold to a buyer or operate on its own. One-stop EU regulatory portals, with default minimum-burden rules, except where the risk is high.

These aren’t fantasy. They are politically tough, but better than burning it all down into a market libertarian nightmare.

Flawed Anti-EU Rhetoric—and why it's bullshit, with data

I wish I could just drop mic after this.

If you’re in libertarian rage mode, watch how often these commentators lie by omission—hiding the benefits and exaggerating the costs.

I get the libertarian/Bitcoin freedom argument— here’s how to fuse it with a progressive, decentralized EU

Let me be clear: I sympathize with the ideal. Decentralization, individual sovereignty, open protocols, censorship resistance, crypto freedom—these are powerful ideals. But you’re barking up the wrong tree if you think EU = enemy. The real enemy is technofeudalism: Big Tech dominance, platform lock-in, data monopolies, and media control. In fact, those guys control your screens, the media, and are "the elite" people bitch about, not the European Parliament, universities, libraries, or whatever else tech bros hate.

Here’s how to make the two worlds talk:

1. Regulation with permissionless innovation
   The EU can craft legislation (e.g., Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation–MiCA) that preserves noncustodial wallets, decentralized protocols without immune zones for predatory platforms. Regulators should build sandboxes and guardrails, not blanket bans.
2. Public, decentralized infrastructure via EU grants
   Use Horizon, structural funds, and digital commons funding to back open protocols, public blockchains, and interoperable identity systems. Make EU funding conditional on the use of open standards and the inclusion of anti-lock-in clauses.
3. Subsidiarity + participatory budgeting
   Reinvigorate subsidiarity: local governance, local control over spending, but funded by the EU. Link EU grants to citizens’ decision-making.
4. Platform co-ops, data trusts, commons—not Big Tech monopolies
   Use procurement rules to favour cooperative platforms, open source, and user-owned data. Use EU regulation to break the silos (Big Tech) and subsidize alternatives.
5. Protect freedom via transparency, oversight, and auditability
   Let blockchain/web3 tools be auditable to citizens. Make algorithms, AI, and data use transparent and user contestable.
6. Redistribution via universal services, not coercive central state
   Think left-libertarian: basic services (health, skills, public infrastructure) publicly guaranteed; markets for nonessentials. EU’s role is to ensure access, not micromanage.

In short: the EU should become the enabler of decentralized freedom, not its suppressor. You can hold a Bitcoin wallet and demand that the EU fund open protocol research. You can rail against Amazon and demand the EU break it up while defending the EU’s consumer protections.

What happens if the EU collapses—the downside you won’t hear in libertarian screeds

Believe me, the chaos is real, and the villains are not bureaucrats (although they waste my time and I sometimes want to kill them, too).

1. Trade collapse: intra-European supply chains break. Tariffs, border checks, divergent regulations. Businesses suffer, prices rise, jobs lost.
2. Mobility collapse: no more free movement—students, workers, cross-border commuters lose huge flexibility.
3. Research fragmentation: labs cut off, funding gone, brain drain. European science loses scale and influence.
4. Weak regulatory weight globally: no block bargaining against U.S./China. Standards tilt toward big powers.
5. Security breakdown: intelligence sharing, coordinated defence, border control all suffer.
6. Currency chaos: euro-zone states forced to reintroduce national currencies—default risk, inflation, capital flight.
7. Vulnerability to external pressure: small states targeted by foreign powers, energy coercion, debt traps.
8. Loss of public goods: environmental regulation, cross-border pollution controls, climate coordination unravel.

In a collapse, you’d trade your “freedom” for disorder, inequality, and monopoly feudalism by the biggest tech powers. The vacuum would be dystopian.

Final word (yes, I get emotional too)

I see your anger. I hear you. We are stuck with broken systems. But the answer isn’t “burn it all.” The answer is reboot, rewire, revolt from within.

You lose half your money and time to taxes and bureaucracy? So do I. That money goes into a patchwork of national systems, not a unified European framework you can optimize. If the EU were built for you—for decentralization, fairness, open tech, checks on Big Tech—it would be something you’d support with pride, not skepticism.

Yes, the EU is bureaucratic, wrought with capture, slow, and sometimes unaccountable. But it also preserves freedoms (movement, data rights, cross-border business) that private systems never will. The real threat isn’t the EU—it’s that we’ll let Big Tech become the gatekeepers of everything. Let them decide what money is, what you see, and how you connect. That’s the nightmare I refuse to accept.

So yeah, get emotional. Be pissed. But channel it. Demand a Europe that funds open protocols, that enforces antitrust, that builds public infrastructure, and that decentralizes rather than centralizes monopoly. That pushes your future outward, not inward.

I’ll fight for an EU that supports your Bitcoin wallet, demands corporate breakups, funds cooperative platforms, and preserves health, mobility, and climate stability. That’s a rebellion worth backing.

Let’s make a Europe that’s more than the sum of its states. Let’s make it a commons where decentralization wins, Big Tech loses, and ordinary people (you, me) are freer than ever.

All my work is published on Ghost, a decentralized, non-profit, and carbon-neutral platform—free from VC funding and the grip of technofeudal lords.
I don’t use algorithms to hijack your attention.
My work can only exist if you share and support it.

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Sources & References

1. European Central Bank (2020). The long-term gains of the European Single Market. Working Paper No. 2392. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2392~83000b6b14.en.pdf
2. European Parliament Research Service (2021). Communicating and perceiving the EU budget: Challenges and outcomes. https://epthinktank.eu
3. European Commission (2024). Roam-like-at-home: 7 years of free mobile roaming in the EU. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/
4. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (2022). Data protection in the EU after GDPR. https://fra.europa.eu/en/about-fra/data-protection
5. Horizon Europe Programme Portal (2024). Horizon Europe: Overview & Budget. https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/funding/funding-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls/horizon-europe_en
6. Eurobarometer (2023). Public opinion in the EU: trust and satisfaction levels.https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_3755
7. OECD (2023). Trade and productivity in the EU single market. https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-01/ASMR%202023.pdf
8. European Court of Auditors (2022). Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund: Effectiveness Review. https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/publications?ref=SR-2024-26