January 2nd 2009
Will Obama Learn From Europe Or Mimic It?
I
n the last census decade, 1991 to 2000, more than 1.3 million Europeans immigrated to America – four times more than had come to America from European countries of birth during the preceding decade. Had America really become so much better in the 1990s that Europeans would fall over each other to get out of there and over here?
Not at all. But Europe certainly was becoming that much worse. The European socialist democracies began falling apart in the 1990s as the inevitability of math began to manifest itself across the continent. As Mark Steyn said today while hosting Rush (paraphrasing here):
Why would a pimply-faced burger flipper in France want to stay there, working to support people who retire at 53 with cushy state pensions and healthcare? Why wouldn’t he want to come to America?
For a government to be big enough to take care of everyone, it has to be big enough to take most everything from everyone. Gerald Ford said something like that, and he was probably thinking about European socialist democracies when he did. These societies have attempted to create what no society has ever been able to sustain: A large and pampered retired class and a large and pampered unemployed class, all supported by a shrinking, highly taxed (and pampered!) working class that’s entitled to six weeks of vacation a year, generous maternity leaves, and nearly guaranteed employment, no matter how lazy and incompetent they are.
European socialist democratic countries pour taxpayer money into their societies in attempts to sustain them. The government owns big segments of the economy: transportation systems, healthcare systems, media outlets, energy providers and various segments of the manufacturing base.
Now Barack Obama is planning to follow the Eurpean model with his $1 trillion stimulus package that will see government more heavily invested in America than ever before. He wants to pour taxpayer (and Chinese) money into traditional government spending schemes – roads and bridges – and green spending to make public buildings more energy efficient. He wants to build rural libraries, put computers in every classroom (and a chicken in every pot?) and buy into healthcare via an electronic medical records system.
He has said he will invest in the Big Three even if Bush does not, in effect partially nationalizing our automotive manufacturing industry (British Leyland, anyone?). And he’s going to use part of the money to expand federal hand-outs via unemployment and medical insurance programs.
In the end, the Obama program may help turn around the economy … or it may drive us into a deeper depression as FDR’s similar program did in the 1930s … but it will definitely make American government bigger and more European, charting our course down slippery slopes it will be difficult to draw back from.
When the 2010 census data is in, we will see that even more Europeans fled their failing economies in the 2000s than did in the 1990s, but by then Obama and his Dem Congress will very likely have succeeded in moving us closer to Europe, not further from it. The millions of British, Scandanavians, French, Poles, Italians and Germans who have fled Europe to America must be scratching their heads and wondering why America can’t learn from Europe.
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