As Daniel Hannan says in his quoted book – the difference between the American constitution and the European Union constitution is that that the United States is about the freedom of the individual, while the European Union is about the power of the state. We all know that Obama’s goal is to follow the European socialist path of economics and social welfare. Give Obama a second term, and this nation will be so entrenched in E.U. style government controls and regulations that it might take decades (if ever) to undo the damage he has done.
by Nile Gardiner
Since the Greek financial debacle last year, there has been a great deal of interest across the Atlantic in Europe’s debt crisis and the lessons that can be learned for America. Not least because the United States may face its own Greek-style economic meltdown in a few years time unless it gets its own house in order.
Fortunately, there is a new wave of political leaders on Capitol Hill who are serious about cutting spending, reining in the deficit, and challenging the Big Government culture that has dominated Washington in recent years. Principled leaders such as Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan for example, who have pledged to take an axe rather than a scalpel to public expenditure.
If any Congressman, Republican or Democrat, is looking for a succinct guide to Europe’s economic and political failure as the EU heads down the path of “ever closer union”, I would strongly recommend my fellow Telegraph blogger Daniel Hannan’s important new pamphlet, “Why America Must Not Follow Europe.”
I’ve just finished reading Dan’s latest publication, which is released this week by Encounter as part of its excellent Broadside series, and to say it is a damning indictment of the European Project would be an understatement.
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As he points out, there is a reason why Americans have for decades been richer and more economically productive than their European counterparts – less bureaucracy, lower spending, lower taxes, faster growth, and fewer people out of work. Between 1980 and 1992, excluding the UK, “the EU failed to produce a single net private sector job,” a staggering statistic. In addition, as Dan notes, Western Europe’s share of world GDP fell from 36 percent in 1974 to just 26 percent in 2011, with a projected fall to 15 percent by 2020. In contrast, the US share has remained steady at about 26 percent of world GDP.
But America’s long-term economic success is under threat from a towering federal debt, increasing government intervention in the economy, and a significantly more expensive and regulated health care system. In short, economic freedom is declining in America as Washington increasingly turns to European-style solutions. As Hannan argues, President Obama’s vision for America is quintessentially European:
My guess is that if anything, Obama would verbalize his ideology using the same vocabulary that Eurocrats do. He would say he wants a fairer America, a more tolerant America, a less arrogant America, a more engaged America. When you prize away the cliché, what these phrases amount to are higher taxes, less patriotism, a bigger role for state bureaucracies, and a transfer of sovereignty to global institutions. In other words, President Obama wants to make the U.S. more like the EU.
He is not pursuing a set of random initiatives lashed arbitrarily together but a program of comprehensive Europeanization: European health care, European welfare, European carbon taxes, European day care, European college education, even a European foreign policy, based engagement with supranational technocracies, nuclear disarmament, and a reluctance to deploy forces overseas.
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Simply put, the steady Europeanisation of the United States is a huge threat to America’s long-term prosperity, international leadership and freedom, and goes against the US tradition of individual liberty. If Americans wish to avoid EU-style decline, they should avoid European-style policies as well as the supranational world view that drives them.
Read the rest: America must escape the doomed path of E.U. decline
