The Third Way is No Way

I've previously cited statistics suggesting Europe's less wealthy than most realize:

The scope and intensity of government-ordered redistribution is the principal reason why Western European GDP growth rates have been half that of America over the past two decades. No wonder Sweden's poorer than Alabama with more crime than Mississippi!

Still, Presidents, Prime Ministers and ordinary lefties have long touted Europe in general, and Scandinavia in particular, as a "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism. Bruce Bawer, coincidentally cited below, advises caution in today's New York Times:

[A 2004] study by [Timbro,] a Swedish research organization, . . . compared the gross domestic products of the 15 European Union members (before the 2004 expansion) with those of the 50 American states and the District of Columbia. (Norway, not being a member of the union, was not included.)

After adjusting the figures for the different purchasing powers of the dollar and euro, the only European country whose economic output per person was greater than the United States average was the tiny tax haven of Luxembourg, which ranked third, just behind Delaware and slightly ahead of Connecticut.

The next European country on the list was Ireland, down at 41st place out of 66; Sweden was 14th from the bottom (after Alabama), followed by Oklahoma, and then Britain, France, Finland, Germany and Italy. The bottom three spots on the list went to Spain, Portugal and Greece.

Alternatively, the study found, if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi. In short, while Scandinavians are constantly told how much better they have it than Americans, Timbro's statistics suggest otherwise. . .

Contrasting "the American dream" with "the European daydream," Mr. Norberg described the difference: "Economic growth in the last 25 years has been 3 percent per annum in the U.S., compared to 2.2 percent in the E.U. That means that the American economy has almost doubled, whereas the E.U. economy has grown by slightly more than half. The purchasing power in the U.S. is $36,100 per capita, and in the E.U. $26,000 - and the gap is constantly widening."

This is no coincidence. Europe looks ever more like France, and France is a disaster: Twenty-five percent of Frenchmen are government civil servants; another 10 percent get social welfare benefits. That's not sustainable, as Europeans are starting to grasp:

The increasingly successful campaigners against the European constitutional treaty in France and Holland are linked by the same thread to the rising tide of nationalism in China and Japan and even to Islamic terrorism. There is a resistance to the demands of an emerging global economy, together with its culture, often seen as coterminous with American or 'Anglo-Saxon' values and interests. In the face of globalisation, the national tribe, be it French or Chinese, wants to reassert the particularity that binds it together and sets it apart. . .

It's the same story in Europe. Fifteen consecutive opinion polls during April have confirmed that the 'no' vote in the French referendum on the Constitutional Treaty stands at some 53 per cent when only three months ago the 'yes' vote was 60 per cent. An improbable alliance of right and left is tapping the mood that French travails in general, and unemployment in particular, are because France cannot be true to an idea of France. France has been locked in quasi economic stagnation for more than a decade; unemployment is 10 per cent and youth unemployment even higher.

Desperation abounds, especially among the young and those beyond the gilded circle of the Parisian elites. The situation must change, but cannot change runs the anti-European argument, as long as France is locked into un-French policies that come from Brussels and the globalising 'liberal' world beyond. The treaty that would set the seal on this must be opposed. If the critics win, the entire European project will suddenly be in peril.

On the verge of trading democracy for centralized and unelected masters, Belmont Club thinks Europe's caught the French flu:

After sixty years of retreat from its colonial heyday, Europe is an idea whose back is to the wall. What it needs now is a new vision and leadership, which with some American help, may address the core of its weakness: suicidal demographics; cultural self-loathing; its oppressive socialist economies. The hour is late and the ship captained by fools but hope still remains.

If Europe, or Scandinavia, represents the "Third Way," then door number three is a dead end.

(via Instapundit)

More:

Political Calculations ranks (pun intended) Western Europe.

(via WILLisms)