As “interesting” as the experiment is, most Greeks, Frenchmen, and Germans were not aware that they were signing on as guinea pigs. In the post-war ruins of
Herman van Hoozee? Well, he’s this curious Belgian bloke who, shortly before uttering the above words, emerged as the first “President” of “Europe.”
Nobody elected him as President of Europe, whatever that means. One day he was an obscure Belgian. The next day he was an obscure Belgian with a business card saying “President of Europe.” Just one of those things, could happen to anyone. It’s not just that he’s hardly a household name in the average European household. It’s not clear he’s a household name even in the van Rompuy household. I don’t watch a lot of Belgian TV, so I’m not sure if they have a “Belgian Idol” or “Dancing with the Belgians” over there, but, if so, he’d be knocked out in round one. Like everything in a European Union all but entirely insulated from democratic accountability, the so-called “presidency” was a backroom stitch-up: neither the French nor the Germans wanted a charismatic glamorpuss in the gig stealing their respective thunders. An obscure Belgian was just the ticket. Being a low-grade nondescript was the minimum entry qualification.
And yet the fact remains that he is “President” of “Europe,” and in that capacity he announced that 2009 was the first year of global governance.
Incidentally, did you get that memo?
Me neither.
Still, I’m always appreciative when a fellow says what he really means.
The upgrading of the G20; the plans for planetary-wide financial regulation; the Copenhagen climate-change summit and its (thankfully thwarted) proposals for a transnational bureaucracy to facilitate the multitrillion-dollar shakedown of the advanced democracies: all these are pillars of “global governance,” of the European Unionization of the world—and Copenhagen alone would have been the biggest exercise in punitive liberalism the western democracies had ever been subjected to. Right now, if you don’t like the local grade school, you move to the next town. If you’re sick of Massachusetts taxes, you move to New Hampshire. Where do you move to if you don’t like “global governance”? To what polling station do you go to vote it out?
Greece’s unsustainable spending is propped up by Germany, and Germany’s unsustainable spending is propped up by America. So who’s left to prop up America’s unsustainable spending? Yet Washington is pushing on to Europe’s future when even the Europeans are figuring you can’t make it add up.
As the fog of Obama’s rhetoric lifted and the scale of his debt mountain became clear, the president’s courtiers began to muse about the introduction of an EU-style “VAT.”47 Americans generally translate that as a “national sales tax,” but it actually stands for “value-added tax,” because you’re taxing the value that is added to a product in the course of its path to market. Yet what Europe needs is to add “value” in a more basic sense.
There are two main objections to the wholesale Europeanization of America. The easy one is the economic argument. But the second argument is subtler: the self-extinction of Europe is not just a matter of economics.
Advanced social democracies don’t need a value-added tax; they need a value-added life. “The Europe that protects” may protect you from the vicissitudes of fate but it also disconnects you from the primary impulses of life. Government security does not in and of itself make for a satisfying, purposeful life. Studies from the University of Michigan and elsewhere suggest quite the opposite—that welfare makes one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one’s family.48 “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray in a speech in 2009.
“And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors—even more to the lives of janitors—as it does to the lives of CEOs.”49 Capitalists sometimes carelessly give the impression that theirs is a materialistic argument. But anti-capitalists do not want for material comforts—you go to the poorest part of town and you see plenty of iPhones and plasma TVs. And Eutopia is distinguished mainly by a lethargic hedonism: shorter working hours, longer vacations, earlier retirements, bigger benefits. What do they do with all that free time? High-school soccer and 4-H at the county fair? No. As we’ve seen, kids not called Mohammed are thin on the ground. God? No.
