Simple maths and its social outcome

Courtesy of Max Black, we find this OpinionJournal.com editorial on the European economic gin-up linked from his blog. The reasons for their stagnation during good times is obvious: the welfare state wasting its efforts not on the poor, but on anyone and everyone, even when economies are doing as well as they ever have in the past two decades:

«The French unemployment rate has hovered around 10% for nearly a decade, and almost half of the jobless have been out of work for at least a year. If the U.S had an unemployment rate as high as France, there would be about six million more non-working Americans--the equivalent of placing every worker in Michigan on the jobless rolls.
Our point here isn't to engage in gratuitous French-bashing. The truth is that the economic anemia afflicting France has become the standard bill of health to varying degrees in virtually all of the nations of Old Europe, particularly Germany and Italy. Once upon a time the intellectual elites in Europe and the U.S. trumpeted the economic accomplishments of European social welfare state policies. Today the conclusion is nearly inescapable that this economic model simply doesn't work to create jobs, wealth or dynamism.»

«The Europeans have created a vast constellation of domestic policy interventions that are cloaked in the seductive rhetoric of compassion, fairness and cultural sophistication.
In sum, European nations penalize work and subsidize non-work, and, no surprise, they have gotten a lot of the latter and far too little of the former. By contrast, the U.S. model--allegedly cruel and "laissez-faire"--has done much better both by economic growth and worker opportunity.»

In other words, people are doing better without being shackled to an anonymous public for the large part of their well being.

While the Neo-COM notion of compassion is proud of how many people are helped, those rotten, evil Neo-cons are most proud of the number of people who no longer NEED any help.