When America Will Become Europe. Thoughts of Our European Future to Come [Victor Davis Hanson]

After concluding another 16 days in Europe. I am again reminded how different their form of socialism is, and yet how closely it resembles the model that Obama seeks for America. The vast majority of citizens lives in apartments, even in smaller towns and villages. Cars are tiny. Prices are higher than in the states; income is lower (The government taxes you to pay for things like “free” college, so you won’t have much to spend on antisocial things like your Wal-Mart plastic Christmas Tree or your second K-Mart plasma TV.)

Mass transit is frequent and cheap, but often crowded and occasionally unpleasant. The stifled desire to acquire something—large house, car, deposit account—is of course not quite destroyed by socialism, but rather is channeled into a sort of cynicism and anger, often leading to a hedonism of few children, late and long meals, and disco hours until the early morning. The number of Gucci like stores selling overpriced label junk like 200 Euro eye-glass frames and 1000 Euro leather bags to socialists is quite amazing.

Multiple political parties flourish, all with passionate single agenda constituents. Graffiti is not gang related, but mostly political and nonsensical. Media is divided by politics, a leftwing paper, a rightwing magazine. Unions control almost all government services. And yet class is firmly entrenched and aristocratic snobbery more pronounced. (We already see that strange symbiosis between socialism for everyone else, capitalism for a few, whether in Michelle’s clothes, the Obama’s mansion, the Kerry fortune, the Edwards compound, the Gore appurtenances, the Clinton speaking cash cow, and to many others to list).

Among upper-class Greeks, one is constantly reminded that their grandfather, their cousin, or mother-in-law was this minister once, or that writer years ago, or today a famous diplomat—anything to focus one’s attention beyond the possession of the normal flat in the normal apartment building and the normal tiny Fiat and the normal public education.

When I talk to well-off Italians and Greeks who have substantial homes by the sea not available to most others, one of three realities leak out: one, they have family money made decades ago by their ancestors that includes ancestral estates permissible before the period of supposed mandated equality of result. In other words, theirs got theirs and then helped make laws so no one else could.

Or, two, people simply cheat on taxes all the time. If you buy something, the offer comes to pay in cash. A Greek explained to me his government job is his official tax-paying day job; the expertise necessary for it is what he farms out at night and on weekends for cash that goes for a second home, a larger car, a vacation abroad.

Or, three, the technocrats who run these vast welfare states are not only well paid, but more importantly are able to garner cars, travel, and plush apartments as tax-free job related perks (cf. the current scandal in London). If being a “venture capitalist” is what wannabe Harvard kids in their 20s sought in the 1990s, being a bigwig Minister, with neo-classical office, state Mercedes, and official residence is the perennial European equivalent. This is a continent of Tom Daschles, who win by being exempt from the burden of government that they subject on others, and win again by having the contacts to sort out government contracts to crony-businesses.

My point? The more Europe professes to be egalitarian, the more cynical and conniving the people have become—almost as if the human craving for one’s own property and to make one one’s destiny cannot be denied by the state, but by needs will be channeled into what the state mandates as anti-social for most, but quietly a perk for a few.

I’ve been reading a lot of commentary in Italian and Greek newspapers these last three weeks and talking to Italians, Greeks, and Turks during two long European lecture tours. Socialism surely does not make one happier, or content knowing that the resulting society is somehow more humane or caring. Instead each faction is constantly on the verge of striking against the public good. There are always the bad “them”, easy-target public enemies among the rich and aristocratic who need to give away more to the “deserving.” The bank workers are in perpetual war against the garbage cleaners who hate the social service workers who whine about the fire and police—each convinced the public must grant more largess on themselves than on like others.

Just as the government is necessary to nanny one and all—and thereby earns both the demands and resentment of the recipient for its caring—so too the United States serves the same role to Europe at large: hated and needed at the same time.

In Greece, they are being hit by a pandemic of Turkish over-lights in the Aegean, and rather cynical efforts of Turkish money-making smugglers to buy wrecked freighters and beach them with hundreds of aliens from the Middle East on the shores of Aegean—Greece being the gateway to the EU money trough for supposed “political refugees”. Illegal aliens are everywhere in Athens. The country is sort of the front lines of European utopian pretension: what sounds good in Brussels is reified in the here and now in Greece with its porous maritime borders on the Middle East.

I would assume that if there weren’t a US-led NATO, some sort of shooting war would quickly break out over immigrants, Aegean air space, or Cyprus. To suggest that privately to Greeks is to earn a grudging nod; to do so publicly is to get a fiery denunciation and yet another tutorial about the 1967 coup, and the Henry Kissinger intrigue in Cyprus, as prequel to Iraq and Bush.

Because I have traveled a great deal in my life, often recklessly so, alone, and to weird places in search of answers to topographical questions of the ancient Mediterranean world, and first-hand observations about battles and campaigns in out of the way places for several books— I have ended up over the last 36 years in a number of socialist hospitals: E-coli poisoning in Athens from tainted strawberries; a cut tendon on my index finger from a barbed wire fence in Sparta (with reaction to live tetanus vaccination); a severed ureter due to an impacted staghorn calculus kidney stone from dehydration of excavating at Corinth; a light case of malaria at Karnak, Egypt; an out of control, strep throat that turned into something more in Izmir, Turkey; a ruptured appendix, surgery, and peritonitis in Tripolis, Libya, and so on.

In each case, the care was terrible. A sole lonely doctor or maverick nurse in two cases saved my life, but on the average the facilities were filthy, and the employees akin to those in the government-run post office or bank. And a strange thing occurred as well: often the staff became mad at the patient: “Why did you come here with an appendix problem?”; You should have not let your strep get out of control!”; “If you don’t drink water, what do you expect!”; “See what happens when you don’t take all your quinine pills!”.

Socialism will always blame the patient (just watch when it comes here), I suppose for drawing on collective resources, and to focus on public enemies whose weight, smoking, or lifestyle (I do not smoke or drink, but exercise and am of reasonable weight) have betrayed the public ideal. (Fat people, and smokers (except our President) will soon become as hated in the socialist mind as jet skis, those in their 80s who want a bypass, Yukons, Tahoes and investment bankers.)

No, Europe should not only not be our model, but Euros know it should not be our model. A few brilliant Europeans whisper, “Of course, it is lost here, since no addict insidiously hooked on government entitlement ever gives such largess up. But you over there still have a chance.” For a few Europeans, America’s military (drawing on fewer people and less territory and GDP than the expanded EU) is the only hope for Western defense. It’s where most life-saving drugs will emerge, new technologies are birthed, and huge sophisticated markets grow for European goods. So they have a stake in not allowing us to become like them.

One final thought: I’ve never met a beatific equality-of-result person. They are usually grim and angry warriors determined to right cosmic wrongs, eager to demonize those who ‘have too much’, convinced that the divine ends justify the demonic means.

In that regard, despite the hope and change rhetoric, when Obama went down that ‘spread the wealth’ path, I feared that we would get the Rev. Wright race talk. It is no surprise that Obama invokes the constant bogeymen who do all sorts of terrible things, among them most prominently the Orwellian Goldstein figure of George W. Bush. There are no legitimate critics, only those Obama & Co. claim are shills for the insurance industries, who unfairly attack the Canadian health system, the greedy who go to Vegas and the Super bowl, the Neanderthal who cling to their guns, the dissidents known as Nazis, stooges, mobs, and the well-dressed who dare to become rude to the Congresspeople.

The road to socialism is not natural. It must be paved with the hard work of class envy, demonization of the successful, and obfuscation that each new massive spending program that will raise both taxes and deficits (that’s the point, after all, to create so much red ink that we must raise taxes and redefine what constitutes income) must be passed immediately, without delay, now-or-never to stave off Biblical hunger, plague, and flood.

In the US the tax consumers are clustered in cities along the coast and the great lakes. The tax producers are in the countryside.

Lovely thought, but unfortunately dead wrong.

It's been known for a good many years that the blue states tend to be net tax payers and the red states tend to be net consumers. Within states you are of course quite correct that central cities are financial black holes.

Here's report from several years back that documents this pattern in great detail.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/sr139.pdf

I have no idea how the recent financial meltdown has affected the situation, but I suspect it's hit federal income from blue states harder than it has from red states, reducing or possibly even reversing the traditional gap.

I did not think of doctors talking to him in the disparaging way, but rather the nurses or aides or orderlies. The British system is so controlled by the housekeepers unions, (think: SEIU) that I automatically assumed that it was that caliber of worker who was being so callous. I have great sympathy for doctors in those systems, because they can only practice their art at the whim of the union stewards and union rules.

Oh - again - that's different as well. Thank you for helping me see a layer of reading that a non-native english speaker might miss rather than just assuming I'm an Obamabot or a rube. That happens on here sometimes.

Yeah it’s awsome.

The median income in germany is still much higher then in the US. Ok AVERAGE income is higher in the US but that doesn’t say americans can buy more.

If for example John Paulson moves to nigeria - nigeria will have more average income then switzerland.

It’s also true that cars are much bigger in the US - and louder and slower and will break down more often because tehy still run on 1970ies tech. That’s why Volkswagen invests in building a factory for some billions for small cars in chatanooga.

Also many europeans live in a rented small flat. While in the US a guy named george w campaigned for pres. some 9 years ago with a slogan - namely the ‘society of ownership’.

It’s a society of underwater mortgages now ... but hey it’s certainly a lot of luxury your bank owns today.

I’d buy or build some small flats in the US now - let’s see if they are for rent - now after george is finished with his ‘society of ownership’ program.

Public transport is annoying sometimes over here - that’s true - it still beats sneaking along the road with 55 miles per hour - spending your whole life either in transit or in the jam.

There’s a lot of stereotypes about europe - it’s unlike the states, that’s true - but it’s not that bad and world best standards of live you will find in scandinavia - best health support, lowest infant mortality, educated people everywhere, low crime, low polution, lot’s of individual freedom... you name it.

And by the way - I am going to the Cote d’azur next weekend - that’s in the mediterranian sea - where people like Steve Balmer, Bill Gates, Paul Allen or Lary Elison are spending their time on a yacht - maybe they enjoy their time in an area where they won’t get shot at even if they aren’t inside some fortress - so maybe we should count their income to where they really live :)

I don't want to live in a rented small flat. To hell with that. Give me the society of ownership...it works for me. It wasn't Bush who created the subprime mortgage either. You would have to look to the Dems for that, to groups such as Acorn, full of community organizers, and Barney Frank.

If I someday have to live in a rented small flat, I will survive it somehow, but not today. I have a modest home that I can afford to pay for, with a yard. Ownership is good.

Ownership is good - that’s a fact. Small flats suck - exprecially in a city like London - also true.

Bush didn’t create the Subprime Mortgage ... that is still correct.

But the decission to not increase taxes for the expenses on warfare but to stick it to the dollar - hence increasng the prices for oil and other commodities - THAT was a political decission.

Also it was a political decission - and wolfowitz stands out here as a leading person NOT to interfere with the markets by creating new and appropriate rules for the evaluation of financial products and to increase pressure on the federal reserve to keep the interests low.

Subprime worked like that - give a person without any securities money to buy a house. Take the debt from all these poor guys and repackage it - and sell the most of it as an investment of highest security (suitable for your retirement investment as an example). Repeat until bubble bursts. (The system works with climbing prices - but trees don’t grow into heaven)

Now that was plain fraud and treasury surely knew what went on. They certainly knew that they stuck the costs of warfare to the dollar.

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