By Kyle Smith
Wednesday, April 06, 2022
How much is freedom worth? Knowing, for instance,
that your nephew in college can’t be locked up for saying rude things on
Twitter after a few beers? Or that you might actually be able to start a
business without an unreasonable level of interference from the state? The
U.S. respect for liberty is no mere abstraction, and its downstream
consequences are evident.
In his thorough and authoritative book Eurotrash: Why America
Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent, my colleague David
Harsanyi notes that Article 10 of the European Union’s Convention of Human
Rights begins by promising “the right to freedom of expression” but then lists
so many exceptions that the so-called right becomes meaningless. The EU might
as well state that people have the right to drive except on weekdays. Article
10 calls for “penalties” for any speech that might, for instance, affect “the
protection of health or morals” or “the protection of the reputation or rights
of others.” If someone feels his “reputation” is harmed, you could be
prosecuted for nearly anything. A harsh movie review? A joke about a soccer
player? If someone in power feels like bringing the hammer down on you, heaven
help you. Thousands of Germans are convicted and fined for insults every year.
Germany also outsources censorship by imposing huge fines — up to 50 million
Euros — per instance of “hate speech” or defamatory “fake news” that doesn’t
get deleted within 24 hours of notification, a law that predictably leads
social-media companies to become their own speech police.
Before you cheer, remember that people from a political
party you oppose sometimes attain power, and they might decree your friends guilty
of “hate speech.” In Britain alone, police wasted time logging 119,000
non-criminal hate incidents into a database. Is that a smart use of police
resources? Far better to have a robust culture of disputation and to accept
that feelings may be hurt than to start locking up those who run afoul of the
powerful. Six European countries have laws that impose larger penalties for
defaming a public official than a private citizen — the exact opposite of the
U.S. So draconian are European laws restricting speech, that trying to comply
with them leads to absurdity: Twitter once blocked a voter-registration
campaign by the French government because its censors thought the tweets might
run afoul of French law. Europe’s much-vaunted “right to be forgotten” is equally
troubling because it requires Google and other companies to remove from the
public discourse important information such as negative reviews of physicians
and even references to the crimes of murderers. The right to be forgotten is a
right to cover up one’s misdeeds.
European secularism is a point in its favor among
Europhiles, but Harsanyi (an atheist) teases out the implications. Our
charitable giving, which is strongly linked to religiosity in America, vastly
outpaces Europe’s by a factor of seven dollars to one, per capita. When Haiti
was struck by a horrifying earthquake in 2010, Americans rushed to donate $519
million within weeks. Americans raised $2.78 billion for the victims of the
2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The U.S. also leads Europe in rates of volunteerism
— and has done so for many years. Secular Europhiles will be alarmed to learn
that citizens of several European countries are forced to pay taxes to support
the churches of Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland.
The establishment clause prevents this from happening in the U.S.
Europe’s secularism has disastrous demographic
implications; as in the U.S., more religious people tend to have more children,
but religion is nearly extinct in Europe except among Muslims. The number of
working Europeans peaked twelve years ago, and now the entire continent is in a
death spiral. This means fewer and fewer producers to support more and more of
the infirm and elderly. Working people are bound to be hit with ever-greater
tax burdens in the future.
Desperate enticements, such as Denmark’s highly
subsidized day care and twelve months of paid family leave, are not working.
Italy pays women to have children, and the birth rate has fallen to 1.3 babies
per woman. Of the 20 most rapidly shrinking countries, 18 are in Europe. In
Germany, the economic engine of Europe, things are looking especially dire:
Almost 40 percent of the population will be over age 60 by 2050. After Japan
and Monaco, it’s the oldest country on earth. Immigration is the only apparent solution,
but the country’s ability to assimilate immigrants is suspect.
That ongoing failure brings up another sharp distinction
between America and Europe: We are far more inclusive and pluralistic.
Tolerance is baked into the American creed. In Europe, 90 percent of Jews
report having suffered some form of antisemitic assault, threat, or insult, and
they can be forgiven for suspecting that the state does not necessarily support
them. A German court ruled that the firebombing of a synagogue in Wuppertal was
not antisemitic because the three Palestinians who threw Molotov cocktails at
the building were merely calling “attention to the Gaza conflict.” They were
given suspended sentences for arson. When Italy first elected a black minister,
in 2013, at one of her first public appearances, a man threw two bananas at
her, and a populist senator, who never apologized and remains powerful, joked
that she reminded him of “an orangutan.” Germany has 500,000 black citizens but
only one of them is in the parliament, and he is regularly subjected to racism.
Protections for existing workers and dislike of newcomers effectively bar
immigrants from many jobs, which is one reason why a 2017 study found that
under 20 percent of adult Muslims in Europe had full-time jobs.
At bottom, it is the American belief system that makes
this country better than our European competitors. Individualism, pluralism,
and economic and political liberty are cherished much more by Americans than by
our cousins across the ocean. Those who say America should become more like
Europe are calling for diminishing the qualities that make the U.S. the
greatest country on earth.
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