1) Europe does not mooch off US defense spending. The only group threatening to kill Europeans is Al Qaeda, and European police forces are defending against that fine. Russia is another potential threat, but only if it has money. And most of it’s income is derived from selling Europeans natural gas.

More to the point several European nations actually spend significant amounts on their military. The Greeks spend 10% of GDP on theirs, and Sweden is one of a handful of countries that managed to design fighter jets.

2) Our budget is inflated by two things: warplanes and health care. No non-US-Navy has more than one aircraft carrier. We have a half-dozen. Super-Carriers. Each is part of a Carrier Group containing more combat aircraft than most Air Forces, and more Naval firepower than any other Navy. In the entire world. Then there’s the bill for thousands of $50 million fighter jets, fuel for those jets, etc. So we could probably cut the Military’s budget significantly and still be militarily dominant.

Our government spends more on Health Care than any other government in the world. That’s right. In the real world Socialist health care systems cost the government less than our free-market system, and tend to get much better results. This is true for one simple reason: the Government has a motive to reduce expenses.

OTOH a private hospital that makes Million$ treating birth defects in it’s neo-natal department has no incentive to prevent birth defects. HMOs have an incentive to pevent brth defects, but they also have a major disincentive. Prevention would cost them money but protect everyone. Therefor they’d lose a major competitive advantage.

So we could probably spend less than Europe is a) we decided to only buy 100 Kick-ass Fighter Jets, and mothballed all but two Carrier Groups, and b) fixed health care. Admittedly b) will take decades, but hey.

3) Overall government size as proportion of the GDP is a really dumb way to measure economic freedom.

Somalia has no government. Government expenditures are zero. This means there are no police. If somebody goes back on a deal you have to hire thugs to enforce it. And he’s hired thugs too. That ain’t freedom, it’s war.

OTOH Western countries have courts to resolve contract disputes. They have established financial markets. In theory they have regulators making sure AIG doesn’t do stupid shit and go boom. They have infrastructure like railroads so a businessman can buy grain in North Dakota and sell it in Detroit. Schools so the businessman can hire literate employees. All this costs government money.

4) There is no rational reason for most people to go to American Universities. McGill in Montreal is superior to most American Universities, and a degree from there only costs $20-$25k US for non-Canadians. That includes housing, food, and a couple grand for play. For all four years. Which means you could work your way through McGill, have no debt, and still earn a degree from a prestigious institution.

At my Alma Mater (the University of Michigan) an in-state student spends nearly $44k in tuition alone. Two of Michigan’s Budget schools — Grand Valley State University, and Wayne State University — charge more than $30k for four years tuition.

So if I’d actually been on the hook for tuition at one of Michigan’s public Universities I would have been really stupid to pick one. Any of them. But I wasn’t so I only spent $5-$10k more of my parent’s money than I would have at McGill.

In school we are force fed this patriotic insanity that America is the only “free” place on earth. I even hear people who otherwise seem to be reasonably intelligent and knowledgeable break that out in conversation sometimes. They’ll say that we’re the only country that has civil liberties.

Of course what makes that most ludicrous is that Americans actually have less civil liberties than people in many other countries. And what about the fact that America puts so many of it’s people in prison?

And yes, sometimes losing a job in this country does mean moving to a cardboard box. More often it means loss of medical care, often leading to bankruptcy.

I don’t think Europe’s birth rate problem has much if anything to do with their tax rate or government. Mostly what I hear from people are complaints about a lack of housing, urbanization, lack of child raising support from European men, refusal to adapt to the needs of child-rearing in two-income families. In other words it may be more cultural than economic.

The high static unemployment, overloaded welfare system, dramatically declining birth rates amongst the native population, and the general sense of political correctness amongst the beurocratic governing class – combined with a huge increase in population from Islamic immigration and lack of integration – will result in enormous social unrest in the future.

mike:

losing a job doesn’t mean moving to a cardboard box.

Seriously, is that really what happens here? Wouldn’t that make Americans significantly less happy if it was? We are still #6 after all.

We certainly have been living above our means for the past 10-15 years or so. Maybe if we wait a few more, all of this inflation caused by massive goverment spending, poor monitary policy and over-regulation will catch up to us and we will be living in boxes.

As for me, I am quite happy here in the US. I just wish that ideologues of both varieties would try to understand what European governments actually do rather than relying on some sort of caricature that either paints Europe as some kind of socialist heaven or hell. It’s a hell of a lot less socialist than either the American Left or the American Right would like to think.

The US should not try to be like Europe, because the US isn’t Europe; but by the same token, the idea that the US would become some kind of a socialist hell-hole if it were more like Europe ignores the fact that Europe isn’t actually a socialist hell-hole.

As for the whole issue of secularism, my point was simply that secularism doesn’t really seem to have much to do one way or another with a decline or improvement in overall social mores or with more government intrusion into individual liberties.

Simply put, if one is going to make the argument that “Europeanism” equates to less economic and personal freedom, one should probably have some evidence for that conclusion beyond simply saying “France.” Unfortunately, the evidence suggests the complete opposite conclusion – and the data I’m using to support that conclusion is the Heritage Foundation’s.

I don’t see Europeans feeling as if life is handed to them by their government. They still show up for work, as a rule, and whether it’s an Airbus plant in France or a Nokia design facility in Finland or a Sandoz lab in Switzerland or a BMW factory in Germany they seem perfectly capable of working as well as we do.

What they don’t do is live in fear that they won’t be able to get health care for their kids.

Americans live out their lives about three paychecks away from a homeless shelter and medical bankruptcy. Maybe that’s why some Europeans are happier. God or no God, most people want to be able to get their kids to a dentist or a doctor and know that losing a job doesn’t mean moving to a cardboard box.

Those are good points. Our universities are usually top-rated in surveys, but I wonder what metric is used. Interesting question.

It still leaves the parochial nature of many Americans. We learn fewer languages and are less well-traveled than a typical western European. Of course it’s a bit easier to get from the center of France to Italy or from the UK to the Netherlands than it is for an American to travel abroad (setting Canada aside). But as a cultural thing we just seem less interested.

A side note about the secularism paragraph. The purpose of a spiritual element in daily life isn’t a connection to a culture or a history, but to a Diety. My guess is that you’re a pretty secular guy, which would make it easy to make the (mis)connection you made. Religion is all about tradition and blah blah blah. Not so.

Overall, I think the point is that the USA exists as a reaction to the large governments of Europe; the nation was created to be a place where government is as small as possible, where individual, God-given freedoms like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are more important than being “taken care of” by a government. And, with the increasingly mobile nature of our world, it should be relatively easy for an American who prefers a more European culture to, well, move and join a European culture.

“No one does universities as well as we do”

I appreciate your response to my post, but I’m not sure I wholly agree with this statement. The industry I work in imports many highly educated foreigners, with which I work closely. I have found differences between all nations in the manner in which they educate, but I have found that European graduates to be similarly educated as we are. Understand that I don’t mean to say other nations are not as well-educated (many highly-educated asians have a wealth of information), but to say that European’s thought processes and problem solving methods are similar to our own.

I would also propose that a US student who attends college in Europe has more value to companies working in a global economy. Unlike others in the world, US students tend to stay within the US.

I wonder if our universities, which were once the ultimate in educational excellence, are being challenged by other nation’s schools. Yes I agree the name of a US school carriers more weight, but the value (dollars per unit of learned knowledge…however that would be universally measured) is low.

No one does universities as well as we do. And of course Americans tend not to have any languages. A university-bound kid in France almost certainly speaks English. So does a university-bound kid in the US.

Shhh, you’re going to confuse people with your crazy use of actual facts.

I just finished 8 months in Italy and found my difficulties there were much less a question of Italian government than with adjusting to a monoculture.

The government, insofar as I encountered it, was great. They got me a residency visa in a single day. Getting a codice fiscale (Italian SSN) took a couple of hours. Getting my car into the country took one day and cost one Euro. (Getting it back into the US was a two week, $3,000 pain in the butt.) Their postal service is pretty good, their cops are easy-going, and the irritating regulations (absurd business hours for example) are cultural more than governmental.

And Italy is normally not considered a model of efficiency.

I’ve also spent time in France which is a beautiful and rather well-run country. Drive an American turnpike and then a French one: the contrast is embarrassing. As are comparisons between French airports and train stations and their US counterparts.

That said, Europe has a much more passive population, and I see them often pushed around by their governments to extents that would make the majority of Americans rightfully squawk.

Whether because of a political or cultural phenomena, or both, Europe’s approach to life’s problems is dramatically more passive than ours–and this may account for their higher level of happiness. After all, you can’t bruise a pillow.

Europe owns very few rightist parties that aren’t legitimately tarred with racism and general ridiculousness. Unlike our own political machine, most European countries lack a true system of action-reaction, and without it, they have a hard time even totting up the price they pay for its absence.

Jake