One thing that has long baffled me has been the idea on the American Right that Europe is some kind of socialist hell-hole that borders on Communist.  The thrust of the argument always seems to be that European government is so large and intrusive, and it public mores so lacking and dare I say nihilistic that it is something akin to Hell on Earth.  Mark Steyn, not surprisingly, expresses this attitude fairly succinctly, writing:

Europeanism is like Communism: the less time you’ve spent living it in practice the better disposed you are to it in theory. In the same way, few of those Americans who want to introduce Canadian-style health care to the U.S. have ever had surgery at the Royal Victoria. Indeed, America is full of immigrants whose hostility to Euro-Canadian public policy derives explicitly from their prolonged exposure to it.

Of course, the definition of “Europeanism” is ill-defined.  So far as I can tell, it’s a reference to a government with a large social welfare system combined with a secularized social policy.  The assumption, which is largely based on a false equivalency that social safety nets = socialism = Road to Serfdom and that United States = World’s Only Bastion of Free Market Capitalism = World’s Only Free Country, is that these “Europeanist” policies make Europe an absolute hell-hole. 

Despite my deep love of the free market, I’ve always found this chain of thought to be utterly absurd.  For starters, the idea that Europe is some kind of hell-hole at all doesn’t seem to line up with reality, as Alex Massie points out:

Never mind that, according to the most recent World Values Survey, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Malta, Luxembourg, Sweden each reported higher levels of happiness and “life satisfaction” than the United States. That isn’t to say that the US is unhappy, merely that there is more than one route to happiness. And that’s the point: europe (however broadly defined) and the United States are each remarkable success stories permitting a greater percentage of the population than at any point in history has the opportunity to make their own choices about how to lead their lives.

But there’s more to it than this.  If “Europeanism” really is that much of a restraint on freedom, one would expect that European nations would have exceedingly tightly restricted economies, with comparatively little economic liberty.  Thankfully, that lunatic left-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation has long compiled a statistical ranking of economic freedoms around the world. 

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I honestly thought I was done on this topic, and for the most part I am.  But given the misunderstandings that seem to have developed (e.g., arguing that it’s “big-government libertarianism,” or that the idea is just an attempt to allow us evil cosmotarians to feel comfortable hanging out with the cool kids), it’s worth calling attention to Will Wilkinson’s writing of the last 24 hours, which draw some really compelling connections that I’ve been struggling to make ever since I started seeing the appeal of liber-al-tarianism almost a year ago. 

Start here, and then look here and here.  Trust me – you’ll learn a lot; I know I did.   This paragraph from the first post is especially enlightening:

The fact that a government is small doesn’t rule out the possibility of egregious restrictions on non-economic liberties or of incredibly burdensome economic regulation. Suppose it takes two years to fill out all the paperwork, get all the licenses, etc. to start a small business, but once you do that, your profits aren’t taxed all. Suppose many forms of exchange are simply prohibited. You might have small government, low taxes, and very little economic freedom. Of course, a small government can ban abortion, prostitution, drugs, a free press, etc. just as well as a big one. Such a government may need to spend a lot of its modest budget on police and prisons instead of on genuine public goods. The size of the budget as as percentage of output doesn’t tell you anything about the composition of spending. This is a really important point. The United States spends a lot on prisons, the military, drug law enforcement, border patrol, etc. A lot of this is the opposite of rights-respecting, and a lot of it is downright wasteful. The composition of spending is important both as a matter or morality and a matter of economic growth (which I happen to think is also a matter of morality.)  Which is all to say, the fact that a government is small logically implies almost nothing about either liberty, justice or efficiency.

This is a point I tried to make, albeit far less successfully, here.  Wilkinson goes on in that first post to note that qualitatively there is little difference between minarchists, liber-al-tarians, and most modern liberals on the issue of “limited” government at least insofar as we are discussing the welfare state and the legitimacy of the government’s authority to tax and spend. 

But to get the full idea, it’s really worth reading all three posts. 

One conclusion that I draw from Wilkinson’s posts, and which I think was implicit in much of my writings on this subject, is that the real difference between libertarians and modern American liberals is over the competence of the government to regulate in a way that does not unnecessarily infringe upon individual freedom.  It is this concept of regulation, far more so than the issue of the legitimacy of a social safety net, that has the greatest effect on economic liberty.

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