Combining a flow of money with a nearly inexhaustible power to borrow because we are the world's reserve currency, unprecedented power flowed with huge tax revenues directly to a central government. States become beggars and supplicants who must conform to the dictates of Washington DC in virtually every activity.
In the process America exploited the power of collective organization, that resembles European "central planning." Central planning in our case exploited the flow of money into Washington to control states rights and, more importantly, managed to run up a monumental federal debt.
If one thinks of the European nations as states, their debt is mostly at the nation state level, not because Europeans are more virtuous than us but because they lack the architecture we have put in the hands of our politicians. The EU debt is relatively small compared to the accumulated debt of its member nations, as seen as a percentage of their gross national products.
Today in this recent meeting, European leader after European leader has risen to exhort his neighbors to reduce powers of individual nations, rationalize burdensome regulations, and redirect assets into energy etc. In short, the call is to collectivize but without the essential architecture, except to add individual nation responsibility for collective debt.
Resistance to collectivization, when it is a phrase that describes moving power from nation states to Brussels, reminds Americans of our tariff struggles before the Civil War and our depression era revolutionary consolidation during the New Deal.
In America, we have driven up the central or federal debt but, many of our states have revealed themselves to be just as profligate as our federal tax Masters, as they have amassed their own staggering debt loads.
Europe is not to be the object of our pity, we are not smarter than they are, we simply had a different history pivoting in a civil war in large part over slavery that fundamentally altered states rights and enabled us to funnel control where we put the power to tax.
