Democracy in Europe

It’s lethargic and uninspiring — and ours could be like it soon.

By Alexander Benard
Monday, March 23, 2009

In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his magnum opus, Democracy in America. The book was designed to give Europeans a feeling for American politics and society, a topic of interest to Europeans in part because of their general fascination with the United States, a new and perplexing country an ocean away. But more significantly, Europeans were curious to learn about the U.S. political system and its societal implications, because many Europeans were thinking about a transition from monarchy to democratic governance. The United States could show them what they would be getting themselves into.

Today the roles are reversed, and it is the United States that can benefit from a transatlantic lesson. With his stimulus bill and his 2009 budget, President Obama has proposed sweeping changes to our political and economic system that would move the United States squarely in the direction of a social-welfare state. America has no experience with such a system — but Europe does. Americans must learn from our brethren across the Atlantic how social-welfare states operate, and what impact social welfarism has had on European society.

President Obama’s stimulus and budget represent unprecedented interventions in the areas of health care, education, and the economy. The budget creates a $634 billion reserve fund to overhaul health care. Obama will use this money to offer a government-run health-care plan, similar to the plan that is available to members of Congress, that people can join voluntarily. The plan will be offered at a generously subsidized rate, so that over time, more and more people will move from private health insurance to this government program. The end result will almost certainly be a nationalization of our health-care system. The budget also establishes various federal grants and guarantees that would set the United States on the path toward tuition-free college education. The stimulus bill, meanwhile, provides billions of dollars to particular projects and industries, thereby picking winners and losers in the private economy — a role usually played by the free market.

To Americans, all of this is unfamiliar and may seem largely innocuous. But Europe affords us an opportunity to see where these policies lead, and the picture is an extremely disturbing one.

Regarding health care: In Great Britain, 100,000 operations are canceled every year because of the need for rationing. In Sweden, patients must sometimes wait 25 weeks to make an appointment for heart surgery. When patients in these countries finally do obtain care, they often find themselves subjected to technologies that have long since been rendered obsolete. These outcomes are not peculiar to Europe; they occur in every country where the government controls access to health care and regulates everything from the price of drugs to the salaries of doctors. These interventions drive down the supply of high-quality health care while driving up demand, thereby creating painful shortages. They also destroy the incentive to innovate, thus limiting the potential for technological advances that cut costs and save lives.

We see a similar pattern in European education systems. Austria and Germany, for example, have made universities essentially free for all students. As a result, far too many students apply to universities every year, which leads to crowded classrooms and professors who cannot devote individual attention to their students. On top of that, the federal government imposes caps on the number of students who can pursue certain oversubscribed fields of study. All of this might be worth it if it enabled deserving students to obtain university degrees they otherwise could not afford. Unfortunately, however, it is far more common for students to remain enrolled for years and years, trying one field and then another, with no sense of urgency or purpose. The atmosphere in the classroom suffers, with students failing to take their academic responsibilities seriously. Why would they, when everything is delivered to them at no cost? This is part of the reason why ambitious Europeans routinely come to the United States for higher education.

Part of the argument in favor of Obama’s stimulus plan was that America’s infrastructure supposedly lags far behind that found in Western European countries, notably Germany. To the extent that this is true, there should be no illusions about why: Large sums of money are taken from Germans so that their government can build grandiose airports, fancy trains, and extravagant government buildings. This means the average German is left with less discretionary income, which is why middle-class Germans have smaller homes than Americans, more limited personal savings, and less money to spend on entertainment, housing, and food. The German system is a reallocation of wealth from the people to the government. Government ends up with more, so government-funded projects look nicer; people end up with less, so they do not live as well or have as many economic choices and opportunities as citizens in economically freer countries.

Far more pernicious than all of this, however, is the effect that these policies have had on the European psyche. The most recent example has been seen over the last few months, when countries around the world were debating how to respond to the collapsing global economy. In the United States, Americans greeted the passage of the stimulus bill in February with mixed feelings; the notion that federal government is best positioned to turn around an ailing economy is not yet universally accepted in the United States. In France, by contrast, hundreds of thousands of workers marched through the streets to demand that the government spend more money, create more jobs, and fund more programs to address the economic crisis. There is nothing in French DNA that makes them more likely to feel dependent upon the government for help in tough times. Rather, it is the cumulative effect on the French psyche of years of quasi-socialism.

The psychological impact of the welfare state is evident in other areas as well. When the German government was exploring the idea of imposing modest annual fees for students at universities, the students protested — at times violently. They viewed themselves as entitled to free university education and were unwilling even to consider the idea that fees might have positive effects (such as allowing universities to modernize their facilities and weeding out students who have no genuine interest in pursuing a higher education). Similarly, a German proposal to introduce a 10-euro ($13) co-pay for certain doctor visits was met with popular outrage. Once government creates the expectation that it will provide a service free of cost, it is almost impossible to reverse course.

The effect of all this is to stifle independent thought — precisely the kind of thought that results in a vibrant private sector, fueled by creative entrepreneurship. Such entrepreneurship becomes increasingly less relevant in the public’s eye as the federal government, not the free market, makes the critical decisions on which products, ideas, and projects merit attention and funding.

It is perhaps in old age when the discrepancy between the American and the European becomes most marked. After a lifetime of personal achievement — of experiencing the full range of risks and rewards afforded by the American marketplace, of having made his own decisions, developed his likes and dislikes, paid for his education, paid for his children’s education, paid for his house, and saved for his retirement — the American retiree exudes an unmistakable confidence, happiness, and sense of accomplishment. But the European retiree has been stripped by the government of the opportunity to experience that same feeling. It was the government that put his children through college and that now pays his pension. Having paid excessive taxes throughout his life, the European retiree usually has not amassed personal wealth or had the opportunity to purchase a significant parcel of property. He has never truly had to rely on himself and those close to him, because he has always known that the government would be there for him — like it or not — should he ever need help.

Some may think this an enviable prospect, but one brief look at the average European retiree tells a different story. The human spirit does not respond well to dependence. It withers. The freedom to make choices, to succeed and stumble on our own merits, the hardiness that comes from having to rely on ourselves — these are the things that make us whole. And that, really, is the most cautionary part of this tale: Americans must resist the creeping welfare state, lest we lose not only our quintessential Americanism, but ultimately also some unquantifiable measure of our humanity.