We're Rich, They're Middling

Back during the Cold War, relations between America and Western European countries were at times strained -- think of the Suez Crisis or France's perennial prickliness -- but by and large warm feelings persisted among the folk. I spent several days with a middle class German family in 1979 and recall their genuine love of the US. The father of that family was a WWII veteran, as was my father, and when we left he hugged us and openly wept, not so much because he would miss us, as because of the reconciliation our visit symbolized. Like many in his generation, he (and we) knew how much better off we all were.

I had the same experience that year in Finland, where again I stayed with a family whose hostility to the Soviet Union was matched by their admiration of American values and power. Walking down a street in Helsinki, I became aware of two adolescents watching me as if they recognized me. When I turned to face them, one of them said, "Are you an American?" (My jeans and flannel shirt -- de rigeuer in those days -- gave me away.) When I affirmed their guess they beamed -- an American! -- and asked me how many people lived in New York! To boot, a family at whose house we spent several evenings drinking vodka (but not in the quantities those Finns managed) and taking sauna had a dog named Jimmy Carter. I'd quibble with their choice of presidents there, but any sitting US president would have been similarly honored.

If those feelings of solidarity have faded in recent years, reasons exist beyond the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the war in Iraq. This morning's WSJ ($) drew my attention to a new study by a Swedish think tank called Timbro. Titled "EU versus USA," the report reveals significant economic disparity between EU members and individual US states. Free marketers know that unnecessary government intervention and high taxation retard the creation of wealth (my campaign slogan would be "create wealth, don't confiscate it"), and Europe's long affair with cradle-to-grave welfare has left its people poorer and, it seems, bitter.

According to the study: "If the European Union were a state in the USA it would belong to the poorest group of states. France, Italy, Great Britain and Germany have lower GDP per capita than all but four of the states in the United States. In fact, GDP per capita is lower in the vast majority of the EU-countries (EU 15) than in most of the individual American states. This puts Europeans at a level of prosperity on par with states such as Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia. Only the miniscule country of Luxembourg has higher per capita GDP than the average state in the USA. The results of the new study represent a grave critique of European economic policy."

The Journal points out that this reduces the buying power of Europeans so that they enjoy fewer amenities than even most low income Americans. For example, while the average living space for poor Americans (defined as those with annual incomes of less than $25,000) is 1,200 square feet, the average for all Europeans is 1,000 square feet.

I would add that the study's results also reveal a risk-averse, backward-looking region whose populace lacks the motivation and vision to compete not only with Americans but, increasingly, with the emerging entrepreneurial societies of Asia. Individual initiative, so central to the American character, has been reigned in by the group-think of welfare state planners and an intellectual class too ready abandon the exhilaration of freedom for the boredom of security. (Think of Bertrand Russell's quip that he'd "rather be Red than dead." Of course, he was already Red, and now he's dead, so he got it both ways in the end.)

Not to be chauvinistic, but surely one lesson of the Timbro study is that Europe's ruling classes are a poor model for American elites to ape. The eye-rolling classes here are fond of comparing ostensibly vulgar Americans to sophisticated Europeans as a sign of their own intellectualism. Of course, most of those Americans' garages take up at least 1,000 square feet, and I doubt their GDP would peg them as residents of Mississippi or West Virginia. It's something for them to ponder over their next Grande Special Reserve Estate 2003 – Sumatra Lintong Lake Tawar.