October 02, 2004
Crystal Ball
Looking into our future, we better hope we don't see Europe's present...
Goverment officials in Holland are trying to unwind the social safety hammock, and finding the one thing the public is willing to work hard for is the right to not have to work hard.
Without creating an economics thesis, suffice it to say - Europe doesn't work. At least not very hard. Retirement, wages, labor policies, unemployment, all regulated and filtered through government planning and policy to create a sense of economic security - but the supposition that collective policy action through the government will somehow provide a result that is greater than the sum of it's parts is nonsensical. The market requires a reaction to market forces that is absent in the socialist West.
It's reached the stage that there is a presumption of necessity of government involvement in order to survive:
"The Dutch way is to take care of people who have less," said Gerard Admiraal, an emergency services worker who attended a protest at Schiphol airport Tuesday."This government wants everybody to take care of themselves," Admiraal said. "Only the rich can do that."
This is a frightening abandonment of self-reliance. As the Dutch government tries to ween the populace from the government tit, we see the natural response of a child - hysterics, protest, and an infantile bleating of abandonment.
As Americans are tempted to look to the governmnet to provide solutions to what appear to be intractible problems - health care costs, retirement, education - we do well to understand the government cannot create more from less. It's conservation of matter - you cannot get out more than you put in. And when the government is involved, you can plan on the inefficiency and impersonal dispatch to provide far less than the sum of it's parts.
I see in Europe's future a painful but neccessary reckoning - one that we can avoid...