I hear 'vassalage' and think 'Rees-Mogg'. Is that really what you want, EV?
I refer you back to the second sentence of the second paragraph in the post (#1803) to which you are responding.
On your other point, I think the fundamental difficulty with an economic community sans any remnant of political union is that you'll get nation states competing for position at the expense of the others. The accession states in the last decade upset the applecart a fair bit (and the UK didn't help itself by neglecting measures which would have helped it) but in the longer term, everybody settles to a broadly similar level. At least some of the reluctance of Eastern Europeans to come here to do manual work stems from the rise of prosperity (=wages) in their own countries and the weak pound, making the economic differential not worth the aggro they've been getting.
So without some form of political union, you'd get a race to the bottom on regulation and costs, for economic advantage. Political union gives you a mechanism to level the playing field. If you're really going to have a proper community, you need that community to respect a set of ground rules. Which inevitably leads to at least a degree of political union. I think the two are indivisible, once you start talking about a community the size of the EU (even when it was half the number it is now).
I don't see the 'ever closer union' as some Machiavellian scheme, so much as a recognition that in a generation from now, the community will be stronger if it stands together politically, economically and ideologically.
This is all a perfect example of the kind of cognitive dissonance that I keep calling out. Fine, woolly, utopian crypto-socialist theory which entirely fails to take into account the nature of humanity - our natural striving for individuality, our essential tribalism and competitiveness, our attachment to customs and cultural distinctions and histories that have been a thousand years in the making, our pride and sense of self and of belonging - and of the actual, harsh reality. The EU project, for all that has done to lift the formerly oppressed eastern and southern European countries out of the darkness of post-communism and dictatorship, is now, precisely by the constant and progressive imposition of economic and political union, and of its top-down attempts at cultural imperialism, a divisive, even destructive force. And you can't look me in the eye (metaphorically, obviously) and tell me that Germany hasn't played the Euro project to its own massive advantage, and to the very ugly disadvantage of the clubmed countries and even France, that the eastern countries don't compete for the car factories, that London doesn't furiously compete to hold onto its massive dominance in the financial services sector, or that on a more prosaic level French ski schools will employ anyone but French ski instructors, and so on. We are a competitive race. Suppress competition, level the playing field too insistently, and you will quickly get something that looks like communist collectivism.
I agree, and have often said, that for the EU, or more specifically the Eurozone project, to ever work properly, there has to be a deep degree of fiscal and political union. This isn't going to happen. The current cheerleader for this, Emmanuel Macron, has pretty much expended his first year's goodwill, and he has hit the buffers. Germany will not agree to the transfer union, and it will not trade in any more of its sovereignty (of which it retains, in its constitution, more than we do within the EU). The eastern countries are in open rebellion against Brussels' attempts at cultural imposition, Greece is looking at the next 60 years in cripplingly expensive hock to Germany, and Italy is teetering forever on the brink of a banking meltdown, and has installed an anti Euro/EU government. Ireland won't look pretty when the UK, its biggest market, leaves the EU without a deal, and Brussels whips away the tax advantages that it offers to corporations, and so on.
Trade involves people and businesses dealing with each other in the complex world of competitive and comparative advantage and disadvantage. It is incumbent upon government and regulatory authorities to regulate and control the markets to a degree that doesn't get
too much in the way of them (capitalism, I think we can all agree, requires at least a degree of fettering if it to work to societal advantage) and governments can instigate joint regulatory bodies, by treaty and common agreement, to control technical and social standards across continents, or even globally. All of the really important regulatory and standards bodies are supra-national organisations that are devoted to precisely these ends - ISO, WTO and the various standards authorities which fall within the UN.
Nobody would dispute that treaty involves some degree of sovereign outsourcing to supranational organisations such as these, or to intergovernmental bodies, but the amount of political sovereignty that countries cede is modest compared with the ambitions of the EU. Australia and New Zealand don't make each other's laws, the EU doesn't make Chile's laws, even the ASEAN nations work on the basis of cooperation and association rather than overt political centralisation.
The EU is a utopian
political project devised to address the problems of the early and mid-20th century, and it is one that no longer carries the consent of the people of the European nations. It is not adapted, and will not adapt, to the needs of the mid-21st century, and in its present form it is a busted flush. It needs to be radically transformed, or broken and replaced. Whether Brexit will serve towards those ends is anyone's guess. If the vision and the statesmanship were there, it could be a massive opportunity. Sadly, it isn't.