Europe - Sleepwalking to further relative decline

It's a good thing they titled this month's discussion at Cato-Unbound with a bit more doom-and-gloom than the sign-off provided in the Theodore Dalrymple's Lead Essay. It's funny, because the very premise of this month's discussion presupposes a significant degree of failure on the part of Europe. While there are certainly many problems in Europe, the discussion seems like an assignment for an undergraduate class to work on their argumentative skills than a legitamate question. In many ways, I think the problem with the entire discussion is that is does not concern what can be done about the most obvious problems of Europe in the next 50 years, but simply to identify them and discuss how the trends are likely to continue.

Essentially, it is a chance for the Cato Institute, whose libertarian slant is rather well known, to bash Europe as the posterchild of unthinking socialist masses - to quote the lead essay's sole cited datum¹, "In France... a survey in the left wing newspaper, Liberation, showed that three times as many people had warm feelings towards socialism as towards capitalism." It is unsurprising that in fact the communist tendency towards self destruction that was exposed with the fall of the berlin wall is occurring once again when communist ideals are applied in an open democratic country - though it is interesting to note that the fact that everyone knows exactly how the system is unworkable and can watch it fail doesn't seem to motivate anyone any more than when the information is hidden by an oppressive regime. Maybe Stalin didn't even manage to prop up communism, he instead killed many people trying to continue what wouldn't change.

The fact of European Socialist government undermining the economic development of the continent is well known, and hardly needs to be remarked upon, even though it's analysis will surely fund many analysts' work to determine exactly where the important lines were and willbe crossedin it's now inevitable destruction. The question that should be asked is not whether Europe is doomed, but rather how can other parts of the world develop governmental structures that will prevent a similar self destructive stance from being adopted.

And so I would like to begin a seperate discussion, one that I think is more important, necessary for the future, and in many ways a more worth topic for discussion; In what ways can we learn from the decline of Europe, especially towards reforming other govenments following similar paths - especially our own.


In many ways, the trends identified by Dalrymple as the motivation for the western European decline are parallel to those demonstarted by many people - the unwillingness to make hard changes despite the clear negative outcome. It's interesting to note the parallel, but ultimately this spirit of perversity in macroscopic human events tends to emerge as a result of the very human attribute of not adknowledging reality in favor of our predjudices. The essential problem is that truth is not manifest, and it is surprisingly easy to argue over what should have been established long ago - the relative efficacy of certain governmental and economic systems, for one.

The problem, as I am beginning to formulate it in my mind, is that as western society has developed into a very restrictive self-perpetuating system. Since the demise of monarchic systems of rule, as John Stewart Mill explains in the introduction to his "On Liberty," the former goal of limiting government to constrain the power of a tyrant has been replaced - the danger that most threatens the public is no longer rules placed from the outside to either curb or drive the society for the good of an individual or group. In fact, it is in many ways exactly the opposite - the fact that people are driven to be helpful is proving to be dangerous in a way that an external tyrant never was. As Dalrymple put is so well in his essay, "the state is either granted or arrogates to itself... ever-greater powers. A bureaucratic monster is created that takes on a life of its own, that is not only uneconomic but anti-economic."

Of course, the anti-economic caracter of the government is not by any stretch of the imagination the goal of the public - certainly not an Ellsworth Toohey, but in many ways simply a victim of inherent human tendencies to incorrectly interpret reality and enshrine their perceptions to the extent that they are unchangable. For instance, American Social security was certainly not an inherently bad thing, (even if it did overstretch the bounds of what should reasonably be done by government) but in attempting to protect individuals from the effect of their possible poor foresight a system was established that is much larger in it's scope, and due to lack of that same foresight, will be tremendous in it's eventual failure.

So in what way can we prevent this lack of foresight from destroying our government? How is it possible to develop systems not as prone to this inherent fault of non-tyrannical government? Has the model of emerging democracies provided a different approach, or simply one that is younger in it's life cycle? These are the questions that should be addressed, not because of the fact that they are some of the most interesting questions about ecomnomic political science out there, but because their answers have some really important effects about how we continue governing ourselves.


¹) Not in any way to impute a lack of rigor or academic strength to the essay, but it does showcase a central fact about the tone and thrust of the arguement.