Being ‘more like Europe' not all bad

Troy Senik Register Columnist

Pessimists about the American condition – whose ranks are legion these days – have settled on a common refrain. To vivify the trajectory of a nation beleaguered by crippling debt, high unemployment and an ever-expanding government, they frequently fret that “the United States is becoming more like Europe.”

As civilizational warnings go, it's not at all clear that this is an effective trope. If you're trying to imbue your audience with fears of a coming Armageddon, there may be better methods than calling to mind sidewalk cafes, art galleries and culinary delights (Britain, if you're reading, that last one doesn't apply to you). The continent may have its shortcomings, but it's not exactly Thunderdome.

The critics, of course, have something beyond the crepes in mind. They're warning, for instance, that allowing more federal control over health care will leave the U.S. looking like England, where the National Health Service regularly provides grimly comic examples of what happens when your medical chart is in the government's hands. In 2008, for example, the BBC reported that, as a cost containment measure, the NHS would only provide funding for a drug that could prevent blindness once a patient had already lost sight in one eye.

They're warning about the perils of dependency cultures that break their leash, as in Greece, where tax evasion is so endemic that nearly a quarter of the nation's GDP is produced off the books. Those same scofflaws take the social contract much more seriously when they're the beneficiaries, however. This is a country where riots actually broke out over a proposal that public-sector workers not receive 14 monthly paychecks a year.

They're warning about labor markets so brittle that they're essentially closing off opportunity to a generation. More than 22 percent of Europe's youth are unemployed. In Spain, one of the continent's great economic basket cases, the number is currently at an unprecedented 55 percent. Even in comparatively less embattled France, more than a quarter of the nation's young people are without jobs.

These are all serious concerns and, alas, movement in this direction does seem to be foreshadowed by events stateside. Yet it's no more reasonable to judge Europe by its most wayward children than it would be to do the same to the United States. Imagine if a foreign onlooker understood American politics purely on the basis of what happens in New York, California and Illinois. They'd conclude that we're a nation where the sum total of government is grabbing guns, counting calories and seeing elected officials retire to low-security federal prisons.

Making these distinctions is important not because of some abstract notion of fairness toward Europe (these are the people responsible for inspiring a disproportionate number of our reality shows – any impulse towards mercy should be resisted). Rather, it's essential because the Continent doesn't just provide cautionary lessons. In some cases, it actually demonstrates a sensible way forward.

Consider health care. While the NHS represents the nightmare scenario, the system constructed in Switzerland is perhaps the world's finest. Sure, it still entails too much regulation of what benefits insurance plans must provide (which invariably drives up costs) and – brace yourselves, conservatives – it includes an individual mandate. But the decisions about what policy to purchase, what treatments to seek, and how care should be provided are all left in the hands of the individual. As the Manhattan Institute's Avik Roy has noted, “Switzerland provides universal coverage at substantially lower cost than the United States while avoiding the quality, responsiveness, equity and provider compensation concerns of single-payer universal health care systems.”

Despite its extractive reputation, we could also learn a thing or two from Europe on taxes – we just have to know where to look. Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on the notion that the U.S. tax code is unnecessarily complex. Should they seek to seriously reform it, they could do worse than to look to Baltic nations like Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, all of which have embraced a flat tax. The result: GDP growth rates of 7.6 percent, 5.9 percent, and 5.5 percent, respectively, as the rest of the Continent languishes.

Consumer-driven health care. Flat taxes. Some countries on the Continent have even managed to privatize their postal services (ours is currently losing $25 million a day).

Become more like Europe? In some instances, it might not be such a bad idea.

More from Commentary

    No articles found.

Join the conversation

Comments are encouraged, but you must follow our User Agreement
