The same class of economists who tell Americans that putting their country first will wreck the economy are marking Brexit's 10-year anniversary by declaring that British voters made a costly mistake — and they're measuring that cost entirely in GDP.
Both the New York Times and CNBC ran pieces this week concluding that Brexit has damaged British growth, citing estimates that the economy is 6-8 percent smaller than it would have been inside the EU. Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom, cited by CNBC, wrote that the negative impacts "reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process."
The Times framed the original government warnings of "an immediate and profound shock" as merely premature, writing that "the economic warnings were wrong, but only in their timing." The subtext is clear: the experts were right all along, the rubes just had to wait longer to find out.
Here's what the spreadsheets don't capture. Fifty-two percent of Britons voted to leave the EU to "take back control" — of their borders, their laws, their self-governance. That was the point. CNBC's own data shows part of that promise was kept: EU net migration turned negative in 2022, as the post-Brexit immigration system "greatly reduced opportunities for EU citizens to move to the UK," according to the Migration Observatory.
But CNBC also notes the unintended consequence: migration from non-EU states surged to fill work shortages, through international student programs and emergency visa schemes for countries like Ukraine. Britain traded European migration for global migration — a different outcome than many Leave voters expected, and one worth scrutinizing.
The pound has taken a hit, operating around 10 percent below its pre-referendum value against the dollar and euro, according to Convera. That makes imports more expensive in a country that brings in significant food, energy, and materials from abroad. The domestically-oriented FTSE 250 has lagged the multinational FTSE 100. The country has cycled through seven prime ministers since the vote. Nearly half of Britons now say Brexit is going worse than expected, the Times reports, and just over half would support rejoining.
These are real costs, and they deserve honest accounting. But the accounting from the establishment press is dishonest in what it omits: the value of self-determination itself. The British people were told they couldn't leave. They were told the economy would collapse overnight. It didn't. Then they were told it would collapse gradually. The argument keeps shifting to whatever metric makes sovereignty look like a bad deal.
The same playbook runs here at home. Every time an American politician proposes tariffs, border controls, or rethinking trade deals, the same expert class reaches for the same GDP projections. They never calculate the cost of not controlling your borders, not controlling your trade policy, not governing yourself. Those costs don't fit on their spreadsheets.
The open question isn't whether Brexit carried economic costs. It did. The question is whether a people have the right to govern themselves even when it costs them — and whether the people who've never had to live without that right are qualified to judge the answer.
