MY FAVORITE MUSEUM
My wife and I spent much of the summer in our favorite museum. It’s called Europe. Not a museum in Europe, but Europe itself.
Since America is an island, Americans tend to be insular and consider their problems to be the world’s best. But it is not so.
For Americans, the rest of the world is thousands of miles away across the Pacific or Atlantic, while Canada is that cold place far to the north where they say "eh" all the time, while Mexico is that sweltering place all the illegals come from – hence Americans see their country as a giant isolated island. A separate universe.
When things are going good, we think there’s no place better – a perspective for which there is justification. When things are going bad, we think no place on earth is going to hell in a handbasket faster. We consider Zero to be such a horrendous disaster because we’ve never been deranged enough to engage in electoral masochism before.
This is a first for us – but for much of the rest of the world, it’s the norm. Masochism, in the form of people accepting subjugation from thugs who declared themselves chiefs, kings, and emperors, has been the political way of life for most of human history. We view America as "the exceptional nation" because it is the exception to this history.
Our cultural progenitor enabling this exception was Europe. Now that Europe is regressing, our fear is that we are too. But fear is a waste of time. Unless we use fear to assess the extent of actual danger, we’ll just wallow in it and not rationally act to get rid of what we’re scared of.
So a glance at Europe could be helpful to see where it’s fallen into the masochistic mire so we can avoid doing so.
First, Europe is the central repository of culture in the world. Of course, the rest of the planet is riddled with cultural treasures, but a look at the map of UN World Heritage Sites – especially if you zoom in – shows the density of sites in Europe far, far exceeds any place else. This is a marvelous heritage – and it’s history, in the past, stasis.
Examples of Europeans unable to overcome stasis abound. No matter where you go in Europe – Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal et al – people have yet to figure out screened windows.
You’d think they’d at least figure out to put a screen on their bedroom windows, but no. In summer, they either suffocate and stifle with the windows closed at night (few homes have air conditioning), or they keep the windows open so every bug and mosquito around can fly in and bite them. This is true even of expensive villas like on Italy’s Amalfi Coast or the Portuguese Riviera of Estoril and Cascais.
Europeans are allergic to automatic transmissions. Renting a car with one instead of a manual gear shift is twice as expensive most anywhere in Europe. Hardly any European has heard of a garbage disposal, much less have one in their kitchen sink. They literally don’t know what one is.
Most European products are crap compared to American ones, or Chinese. An American-made thermos, for example, keeps coffee warm three or four times longer than one made in Europe (yes, even a German one). America leaves Europe in the dust in terms of product choice, availability, and customer service.
Then there are the prices. They are stupidly high. One major reason they are stupidly high is stupidly high taxation. Gasoline at the pump is a prime example. Here is the EIA (US Energy Information Agency) list of retail gasoline prices (US$ per gallon) of six selected European countries plus the US without taxes. Note all seven are pretty much the same.
Now look at the EIA list with taxes, and get ready for your jaw to drop. The average US tax (federal + state which varies) is 40 cents. In Europe, it’s 10 to 13 times as much.
Anything else you buy – any product, a meal in a restaurant, a hotel room, whatever – the price is jacked up with a 20 to 25% VAT tax. Income taxes are more extortionary than the US. This is for Western Europe – some countries in Eastern Europe are lower. Here’s the Europe Tax List.
We complain, and rightly so, about our small businesses drowning in an ever-rising swamp of federalie rules and regs, while we have an economy of joblessness and part-time employment. The EU leaves us in its rear-view mirror on both.
You can grow just about anything in Portugal. Agricultural exports were a mainstay of the economy until EU regs and controls killed them, and the euro priced them out of the market. The Euro Straightjacket is destroying the Club Med economies – Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal – plus Ireland and France.
After 18 months of recession (negative GDP), the Eurozone’s second quarter of 2013 barely rose out of it at 0.3%. That’s because the German locomotive pulled the EU along at a hot 0.7%. Most economists, however, see the region falling back into Recession City in 2014.
Three primary reasons are: 1) the euro is the world’s most overvalued currency. This is due to the ego of EU bureaucrats who get a thrill of it being priced at over 30% above the dollar. Anyone rational would want a far lower euro to make European products more competitive. 2) the lack of any leadership whatever in any EU country capable of standing up to the mandarins in Brussels.
The countries of eurozone Europe are no longer sovereign nations, but are administrative districts of EU HQ in Brussels. We see this happening in the US, but it is far more advanced now in Europe.
And 3) pathological unemployment rates. 93 million people in the eurozone don’t have jobs. Youth unemployment (17-26) is now averaging 24% throughout the eurozone, and is at 63% in Greece, 56% in Spain, 40% in Italy, 38% in Portugal, and 28% in France.
It’s a "lost generation" crisis much more severe than what we have.
The reason for it is that anti-capitalism and envy of entrepreneurial success has become epigenetically hard-wired into the average European brain, whereas Zero and the Dems are trying to artificially graft it onto Americans’.
The graft will not take. Liberals are drug pushers and they have indeed managed to get millions of Americans addicted to the drug of government handouts and subsidies. But the addicts’ votes will become less and less of a factor now as states enact and enforce Voter ID laws (which is why the Dems are so hysterically condemning it with the Newspeak description of "voter suppression" – it’s their cheating that will be suppressed).
A fundamental difference between Europeans and Americans is that the former see their best days in the past. The French epitomize this, of course, ever dreaming of their days of gloire (glory) during Louis XIV and Napoleon. But just about every country in Western Europe is the same.
It’s different in Eastern Europe, digging out of its oppression of Soviet Communism. From Poland to Albania, the region wants to look to the future.
America has always looked to the future. From its inception, it has been the most dynamic, game-changing nation on the globe. Lots of us can get depressed about our country’s future during these days of the Curse of Zero, but that will quickly change when he no longer infests the White House. We should have no doubt that with his departure, Americans will recapture the optimism they have always had.
It was a firm belief of Ronald Reagan’s that America’s best days were ahead of her, not behind. Reagan spoke for us. We have lost our way, but we shall find it again. Europe may be a museum, but America is not. Not yet. And once we regain our traditional American optimism, it never will be.