This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 21st, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

The battle lines are being drawn over the June vote for Britain to leave the European Union.

Tom Clarity is managing editor of the Cato Journal and former executive director of London's

Adam Smith Institute.

We spoke about the so-called Brexit last week.

Well, the European Union has evolved considerably over the last 60 years, I suppose, since we initially created the European Cold and Still community

after the Second World War.

That was just a collection of a few European countries trading very particular goods. Today we have something much more akin to a

superstate, but it's certainly not quite a superstate yet, but it is far more than a

trading area. You know I think that a good way to think about what the European

Union is like is by way of an analogy and I think this might work for an American

audience you know if you as an American were told you could have free trade from the northern tip of Canada to the southern tip of Argentina,

that would sound quite good.

If you were then told that this free trade would not just involve the movement of goods, services and capital, but also people that anyone from anywhere in the Americas would be able to settle and work anywhere else, well, okay, you and I and I Caleb as libertarians as free market

guys we'd still like that idea I think you might lose the support of at least some

of the population at that point but then you got to go to a third level and say you're going to have a set of pan-American political

institutions, parliament, a commission, a permanent bureaucracy, courts of justice.

These institutions are going to have the power to make rules and laws in a very wide variety of

areas, everything from environmental legislation down to employment law.

And those laws are going to be supreme.

They're going to take precedence over anything

that you, as the United States of America,

...