Land of the “Free”

Yesterday at USA Today Robert Robb had an op-ed attempting to educate those drawn to “democratic socialism” about the pitfalls:

If young Americans survey the world and come to the conclusion that the answer is more government and greater control by politicians, so be it. They are the ones who will reap the consequences of that misjudgment.

Besides, it’s not as though my generation, the baby boomers, have been good stewards of our patrimony. The march of millennials toward European-style social democracy will be inhibited by the massive government debt and insolvent public pension programs we will be bequeathing them. Baby boomers aren’t really in a position to be tut-tutting other generations, irrespective of how old we become.

But if young Americans want the United States to become more like Europe, they can get there over time. Young Americans wanting to make that march are unlikely to take the advice of a long-in-the-tooth libertarian conservative. But here it goes anyway.

There is one mistake that would be much more serious than the others and potentially fatal to the entire enterprise. While the term “democratic socialism” is in vogue, that’s not really what’s in prospect. If the term socialism is to retain any useful meaning, it refers to government ownership of strategic commercial enterprises. “Democratic” socialism is distinguished from communism in that the body politic gets to choose who mismanages the enterprises.

Europe abandoned socialism decades ago. The countries there have various iterations of democratic capitalism that can loosely be denoted as “social democracy.”

There are two aspects of social democracy as practiced in Europe that distinguish it from the form of democratic capitalism prevailing in the United States.

The first is a much more extensive social welfare state. Health care is almost universally treated as a public good in Europe, the responsibility of government to provide in one way or another. There are generally broader safety net programs for the poor and even the middle class.

The second is greater regulation of capital and especially labor markets. Pursuing that is the potentially fatal mistake.

There is perhaps no clearer lesson from history than that markets produce greater material well-being for a society, including for the poor. And markets work best when there is free movement of capital and labor.

and succeeds in a pratfall. To understand why let’s turn to Heritage House’s (Heritage House’s!) ranking of countries according to the Index of Economic Freedom:

Ranking	Country
1	Hong Kong
2	Singapore
3	New Zealand
4	Switzerland
5	Australia
6	Ireland
7	United Kingdom
8	Canada
9	UAE
10	Taiwan
11	Iceland
12	United States
13	Netherlands
14	Denmark
15	Estonia

Sweden and Finland are just a tick below that at 19 and 20, Germany a little below that at 24. Ignore the top two. They’re authoritarian city-states—there’s nothing for us to learn from them. Switzerland eschews “foreign entanglements”. It doesn’t belong to the EU and avoided joining the UN until 2002. Women didn’t get the vote there until 1976. It’s a very small consensus-based country. Ignore UAE—it’s a tiny, authoritarian petrostate.

The rest of those countries are just as economically free as we are with enormously more substantial social safety nets. There is clearly something different about the U. S. What is it?

Every single one of those countries that comingle social democracy and economic freedom is materially an ethnic state. We have never been an ethnic state and never will be. Clearly, it makes a difference. The issues are political and social. In the U. S. “looking out for #1” is the order of the day and for many that means people who look like them.

What we look like is a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state like Russia. I think that freedom is a more practical aspiration for the United States and that in the United States aspiring to social democracy will inevitably lead to less freedom which in turn will lead to less social democracy.

What about France? Heritage House no longer rates France as “mostly free”, it’s also stepping away from its welfare state, and there are people rioting in the streets every weekend. That’s our future unless we choose an achievable goal.