After America

government spending accounts for just under 72 percent of the economy.⁴⁰ Fortunately for what’s left of America’s private sector, “the Welsh model” doesn’t have quite the same beguiling ring as “the Swedish model.” But, even so, if Scandinavia really is the natural condition of an advanced democracy, then we’re all doomed.

That was the general thesis of America Alone—that the jig is up for much if not most of the western world. “Alarmist,” pronounced The Economist,⁴¹ reflecting the general consensus of polite society in both Europe and North America. Polite society has spent the years since playing catch-up.

So if you don’t want your fin de civilisation analysis from a frothing right-wing loon you can now get it from the house-trained chaps at the New York Times: “Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism… ‘The Europe that protects’ is a slogan of the European Union.”⁴²

Protects from what? Right now, Europe mostly needs protection from itself and its worst inclinations: “With low growth, low birth rates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle.”

Even in its heyday—the Sixties and Seventies—the good times in Europe were underwritten by the American security guarantee: the only reason why France could get away with being France, Belgium with being Belgium, Sweden with being Sweden is because America was America. For over sixty years America has paid for Europe’s defense. And because the United States Army lives in Germany, that frees up Germany to spend its defense budget on government health care and all the rest. In essence, American taxpayers pay for German entitlements.

And it still isn’t enough.

So the world has deemed Greece “too big to fail,” even though in (what’s the word?) reality it’s too big not to fail. And the rest of us are too big not to follow in its path: “Another reform high on the list is removing the state from the marketplace in crucial sectors like health care, transportation and energy and allowing private investment,” reported the New York Times. “Economists say that the liberalization of trucking routes —where a trucking license can cost up to $90,000—and the health care industry would help bring down prices in these areas, which are among the highest in Europe.”⁴³

Removing the state from health care brings down prices? Who knew?

This New York Times is presumably unrelated to the New York Times that spent the previous year arguing for the U.S. government’s annexation of health care as a means of controlling costs. And entirely unrelated to the New York Times whose Nobel Prize-winning economics guru, Paul Krugman, pronounced Europe “the Comeback Continent” in 2008.⁴⁴

About half the global economy is living beyond not only its means but its diminished number of children’s means. Instead of addressing that fact, countries with government debt of 125 percent of GDP are being “rescued” by countries with government debt of 80 percent of GDP. Good luck with that.

THE YANK BONE CONNECTED TO…?

The day after the 2010 election, I found myself sharing a stage with Howard Dean, former Governor of Vermont and head of the Democratic National Committee.⁴⁵ Governor Dean mused that the European Union was one of the most interesting experiments in government ever attempted.

As “interesting” as the experiment is, most Greeks, Frenchmen, and Germans were not aware that they were signing on as guinea pigs. In the post-war ruins of la gloire de la republique, the French created the embryo EU to be a kind of Greater France—as a way of avoiding the truth about their own diminished status. It worked too well, and, when the EU took on many of the calcified qualities of its dominant founder, the elite thought it was time to pass the buck up yet again. The Eurocrats are now in favor of the European Unionization of the world. As Herman van Rompuy put it: “2009 is the first year of global governance.”⁴⁶

Herman van Hoozee? Well, he’s this curious Belgian bloke who, shortly before uttering the above words, emerged as the first “President” of “Europe.”

Nobody elected him as President of Europe, whatever that means. One day he was an obscure Belgian. The next day he was an obscure Belgian with a business card saying “President of Europe.” Just one of those things, could happen to anyone. It’s not just that he’s hardly a household name in the average European household. It’s not clear he’s a household name even in the van Rompuy household. I don’t watch a lot of Belgian TV, so I’m not sure if they have a “Belgian Idol” or “Dancing with the Belgians” over there, but, if so, he’d be knocked out in round one. Like everything in a European Union all but entirely insulated from democratic accountability, the so-called “presidency” was a backroom stitch-up: neither the French nor the Germans wanted a charismatic glamorpuss in the gig stealing their respective thunders. An obscure Belgian was just the ticket. Being a low-grade nondescript was the minimum entry qualification.

And yet the fact remains that he is “President” of “Europe,” and in that capacity he announced that 2009 was the first year of global governance.

Incidentally, did you get that memo?

Me neither.

Still, I’m always appreciative when a fellow says what he really means.

The upgrading of the G20; the plans for planetary-wide financial regulation; the Copenhagen climate-change summit and its (thankfully thwarted) proposals for a transnational bureaucracy to facilitate the multitrillion-dollar shakedown of the advanced democracies: all these are pillars of “global governance,” of the European Unionization of the world—and Copenhagen alone would have been the biggest exercise in punitive liberalism the western democracies had ever been subjected to. Right now, if you don’t like the local grade school, you move to the next town. If you’re sick of Massachusetts taxes, you move to New Hampshire. Where do you move to if you don’t like “global governance”? To what polling station do you go to vote it out?

Greece’s unsustainable spending is propped up by Germany, and Germany’s unsustainable spending is propped up by America. So who’s left to prop up America’s unsustainable spending? Yet Washington is pushing on to Europe’s future when even the Europeans are figuring you can’t make it add up.

As the fog of Obama’s rhetoric lifted and the scale of his debt mountain became clear, the president’s courtiers began to muse about the introduction of an EU-style “VAT.”⁴⁷ Americans generally translate that as a “national sales tax,” but it actually stands for “value-added tax,” because you’re taxing the value that is added to a product in the course of its path to market. Yet what Europe needs is to add “value” in a more basic sense.

There are two main objections to the wholesale Europeanization of America. The easy one is the economic argument. But the second argument is subtler: the self-extinction of Europe is not just a matter of economics.

Advanced social democracies don’t need a value-added tax; they need a value-added life. “The Europe that protects” may protect you from the vicissitudes of fate but it also disconnects you from the primary impulses of life. Government security does not in and of itself make for a satisfying, purposeful life. Studies from the University of Michigan and elsewhere suggest quite the opposite—that welfare makes one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one’s family.⁴⁸ “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray in a speech in 2009. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors—even more to the lives of janitors—as it does to the lives of CEOs.”⁴⁹ Capitalists sometimes carelessly give the impression that theirs is a materialistic argument. But anti-capitalists do not want for material comforts—you go to the poorest part of town and you see plenty of iPhones and plasma TVs. And Eutopia is distinguished mainly by a lethargic hedonism: shorter working hours, longer vacations, earlier retirements, bigger benefits. What do they do with all that free time? High-school soccer and 4-H at the county fair? No. As we’ve seen, kids not called Mohammed are thin on the ground. God? No.

When you worship the state-as-church, you don’t need to bother showing up to Mass anymore. Civic volunteerism? No. All but extinct on the Continent. Do they paint, write, compose? Not so’s you’d notice. Never