[W]hile many of the criticisms leveled against the E.U. for being too big, too costly, and intervening where it shouldn’t may sound like familiar gripes in the United States, the E.U. and the U.S. federal government are in no way equal.

The E.U. commission has 33,000 employees—half the number employed by the U.S. Social Security Administration alone. The E.U. has no right to tax, and its budget is around 1 percent of the GDP of the E.U. countries, compared to around 20 percent in the U.S….

Most often, nationalists complain that Brussels is promoting a “neo-liberal” agenda that stops them from protecting their markets with tariffs and technical trade barriers and from subsidizing national champions and local industry.

This is part of what the E.U. does, and it is consistent with F.A. Hayek’s 1939 vision of a European Federation that guaranteed free trade and openness between the member states, to make peace and cooperation possible. Since it allows local experiments and guarantees that capital and labor can move freely between markets, to those that are the most welcoming, it makes institutional competition possible.

A Timbro study by Alexander Fritz Englund showed that E.U. membership for the 28 countries resulted in a statistically significant increase in economic freedom in all of the sub-categories in The Economic Freedom of the World index. The biggest improvement comes in the year of membership, but it increases afterwards as well.