After America - Mark Steyn [59]
Even in its heyday—the Sixties and Seventies—the good times in Europe were underwritten by the American security guarantee: the only reason why France could get away with being France, Belgium with being Belgium, Sweden with being Sweden is because America was America. For over sixty years America has paid for Europe’s defense. And because the United States Army lives in Germany, that frees up Germany to spend its defense budget on government health care and all the rest. In essence, American taxpayers pay for German entitlements.
And it still isn’t enough.
So the world has deemed Greece “too big to fail,” even though in (what’s the word?) reality it’s too big not to fail. And the rest of us are too big not to follow in its path: “Another reform high on the list is removing the state from the marketplace in crucial sectors like health care, transportation and energy and allowing private investment,” reported the New York Times. “Economists say that the liberalization of trucking routes—where a trucking license can cost up to $90,000—and the health care industry would help bring down prices in these areas, which are among the highest in Europe.”43
Removing the state from health care brings down prices? Who knew? This New York Times is presumably unrelated to the New York Times that spent the previous year arguing for the U.S. government’s annexation of health care as a means of controlling costs. And entirely unrelated to the New York Times whose Nobel Prize-winning economics guru, Paul Krugman, pronounced Europe “the Comeback Continent” in 2008.44
About half the global economy is living beyond not only its means but its diminished number of children’s means. Instead of addressing that fact, countries with government debt of 125 percent of GDP are being “rescued” by countries with government debt of 80 percent of GDP. Good luck with that.
THE YANK BONE CONNECTED TO . . . ?
The day after the 2010 election, I found myself sharing a stage with Howard Dean, former Governor of Vermont and head of the Democratic National Committee.45 Governor Dean mused that the European Union was one of the most interesting experiments in government ever attempted. 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 la gloire de la république, the French created the embryo EU to be a kind of Greater France—as a way of avoiding the truth about their own diminished status. It worked too well, and, when the EU took on many of the calcified qualities of its dominant founder, the elite thought it was time to pass the buck up yet again. The Eurocrats are now in favor of the European Unionization of the world. As Herman van Rompuy put it: “2009 is the first year of global governance.”46
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