coalition governments in which both Christian Democrats and Social Democrats accepted the broad framework of a mixed social market. Instead of competition between states, they would pursue political and economic integration.
We can now see where that road leads: to burgeoning bureaucracy, more spending, higher taxes, slower growth, and rising unemployment. But an entire political class has grown up believing not just in the economic superiority of Euro-corporatism but in its moral superiority. After all, if the American system were better – if people and businesses could thrive without government supervision – there would be less need for politicians. As Upton Sinclair once observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”
Nonetheless, the economic data are pitilessly clear. For the past 40 years, Europeans have fallen further and further behind Americans in their standard of living. In 1974, Western Europe, defined as the 15 members of the EU prior to the admission of the former Communist countries in 2004, accounted for 36 percent of world GDP. Today that figure is 26 percent. In 2020 it will be 15 percent. In the same period, the U.S. share of world GDP has remained, and is forecast to remain, fairly steady at around 26 percent.
At the same time, Europe has become accustomed to a high level of structural unemployment. Indeed, if we exclude the United Kingdom, the EU failed to produce a single net private-sector job between 1980 and 1992. Only now, as the U.S. applies a European-style economic strategy based on fiscal stimulus, nationalization, bailouts, quantitative easing, and the regulation of private-sector remuneration, has the rate of unemployment in the U.S. leaped to European levels.
For the past 40 years, Europeans have fallen further and further behind Americans in their standard of living.
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