m4dad, purits. Nice tries. It isn't worth it. The argument over demonstrate versus believe is the debate in a microcosm. Interestingly enough no one put out a well argued "benefits and costs" statement for EU membership, only a poorly argued and reasoned "cost to leave" package.
Remainers believe we haven't sacrificed democracy even though the EU commission propose legislation and commissioners are allocated a domain and literally no-one in the U.K. has any say. Not the PM in the council, not the ministers of the area, not the UK parliament and certainly not you or I. These commissioners get to propose legislation in the form of directives, that can be maximum harmonising, and define the scope of the delegated acts that the directive allows. The delegated acts wording is developed by committees operating under EU bodies like EBA, EIOPA etc which have Uk representation but the Uk doesn't always "hold the pen" and so has to negotiate what it wants. We are pretty good at that usually. The entirety of the Uk industry and economy in the area concerned has to follow all the rules not just the bit that trades internationally. This can mean less consumer protection in some areas than desired. Where directives are not maximum harmonising we can go to a higher bar but must still accept what has been decided.
The critical fact is at the end of this process we have zero chance of wiping the slate clean and creating a new rule book by voting. We can vote in a new government here but even if the impact of the directive is to wipe out an entire sector of the UK economy we can do nothing to get the rules off the statute book unless we plead and plead, and ultimately have to give up something significant somewhere else in the negotiation to get the rules changed.
The EUs gradually increasing areas of legislative competence mean the patch the Uk voter can directly influence by voting gets smaller and smaller as time goes by.
The pre referendum pitch was that the EU hadn't had much impact on domestic law and we were still fully sovereign but after we voted to leave suddenly it is amazing how much EU law was affecting thr Uk and who hard it is to leave. Hmmm.
I have read this thread with interest and once again no one has stood up and said they want to be in a federal Europe. The argument for staying is that it will cost too much to leave. It costs a fortune to move house but people still do it. Poor analogy perhaps but it shows how weak the remain argument is if you just think economics.
And as I said up above the treasury model for the costs of leaving assume several things that are demonstrably false or uses poor logic. One glaring example is the underlying assumption that the cost of leaving is equivalent to the benefits of joining seen by countries in the EU. A moments thought is all that is required to see that this is stupid. Costs of shipping have fallen dramatically since the U.K. joined. Tariffs have fallen across the world dramatically since the U.K. joined. The Eastern European countries had a chronic lack of investment that was dramatically eased when they joined the EU which certainly doesn't apply when leaving. Etc etc etc I can understand why the modelling is simplified, dramatically, when you make this assumption but it doesn't make the output of the model true.
But hey. I am a stupid leave voter and can't possibly have thought through the issues, nor can I have any actual experience of EU law making and the compromises in the process.