The American System Rejects Europe’s Economic Suicide

American Thinker ^ | 2 Jul, 2026 | J.B. Shurk

[MtnClimber]

National self-sufficiency beats globalism’s mass dependency.

What makes a nation wealthy? It’s not just arable lands surrounded by other lands filled with water, timber, coal, gas, oil, metals, and minerals. It’s the farmer who knows best how to cultivate those lands in order to maximize food production. It’s the woodsman, miner, fisherman, and oilman who can extract nature’s bounty and provide the raw materials for every kind of manufacturer.

Producing things requires knowledge and skill. Competition between producers creates an incentive to innovate. This motor of discovery — in which human ingenuity uses established knowledge and long-harnessed skills as inputs for creating new forms of knowledge and skill — generates increasing efficiencies in production. Costs go down; prices go down; producers produce more; consumers consume more. Economic freedom, therefore, is a wealth-generating feedback loop that benefits all of society.

A nation that can do all of these things on its own is a self-sufficient nation. A nation that is capable of producing more than it consumes is an exporting nation. A nation that exports more than it imports is a nation whose people become increasingly wealthy. The rest of the world pays that nation for its way of life. The world pays that nation simply for existing.

Anyone who says that a nation’s culture is irrelevant to a nation’s standard of living is a liar. Productive cultures generate national wealth. Lazy, reckless, or destructive cultures ensure lasting poverty. There’s an adage so old and universally embraced that numerous cultures claim authorship: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. People generally acknowledge these truths. Whether you are a ninth-century Viking raider or a twenty-first-century welfare queen

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Society
KEYWORDS: europe; leftism; socialism

[MtnClimber]

The democRATs want a nation of pirates and fraudsters. They think there will always be enough people to steal from.

[ComputerGuy]

In America, many of our social programs are based on race, regardless of how they are presented.

[posterchild]

I'd be interested in the author expanding further on:

The Bank of England and the Secret Intelligence Service work together to game the international economy by stirring up regional conflicts and using insider knowledge to bet on the eventual market winners. Britain’s central bank has ensured that the wealthiest members of society profit from market manipulation while the rest of society suffers from currency depreciation. This is an economic model engineered to benefit a small cabal of “noble elites” while impoverishing the larger nation.

[marktwain]

The Bank of England and the Secret Intelligence Service work together to game the international economy by stirring up regional conflicts and using insider knowledge to bet on the eventual market winners. Britain’s central bank has ensured that the wealthiest members of society profit from market manipulation while the rest of society suffers from currency depreciation. This is an economic model engineered to benefit a small cabal of “noble elites” while impoverishing the larger nation.

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A silly conspiracy theory which runs up against the uncomfortable truth: The entire world has gotten much, much richer during the time Britains central bank and the Federal Reserve System have been in operation.

We may not like that truth, but it is the truth. Look at the life of common people everywhere. The United States has made great gains, but so has the rest of the world.

The percentage of people in dire poverty has been dramatically reduced, just in the last 50 years, all over the world.

[Arkady]

What a country needs to be wealthy even more than natural resources is freedom. Freedom to own property, businesses, the fruits of one’s labor. Import that to developing nations and they would lift themselves out of poverty.

[Opinionated Blowhard]

For the United States to be wealthy and strong, we must return to an American system that mines, grows, and builds everything. Our people must embrace both personal and national self-sufficiency. We must reject Europe’s economic suicide.

Europe's suicide doesn't have much to do with economic self-sufficiency where a country mines, grows and builds everything itself. North Korea does that. So did Albania under its Communist rulers. Countries that follow that model end up very poor. There are good arguments to be made that trade hollows out the middle class but the answer is not a country doing everything itself. Europe's suicide is due to mass immigration? Mass immigration was prompted by non-replacement birthrates. Non-replacement birthrates was arguably prompted by the cradle-to-grave Welfare State that also is destroying the economy because it is built on having more young workers than old and non-working takers. In the 1800s, free trade without a Welfare State created a massive increase in national wealth although it was very disruptive and created boom and bust cycles that prompted the Welfare State. The Welfare State worked for a while because it leeched off of residual Capitalist wealth. But that gravy train is over and Western society is now paying the piper. The answer is not national autarky plus a Welfare State. That would be a disaster.

[Uncle Miltie]

The DSA is winning in the Demoncrap Party with full red blooded COMMUNISM.

[Uncle Miltie]

Changing tagline.