The happier place, America or Europe? (updated 25sep19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 September 2019.  An edited version was printed (here) in the 21sep19 edition of The Union.]

Our national Left has loudly included in their narrative to fundamentally transform America, that the Europeans are a much happier lot than we poor polarized and poverty-stricken wretches on this side of the Pond.  The citizens of the EU are described as a people happy with their subsidies and socialism, cared for from cradle to grave with extended vacations, shorter work weeks, job security, and lavish no-cost healthcare.  What’s not to like?

Actually, the Europeans have a lot of worries, and when you talk to them on a personal level, they are ready and willing to go through the long list.  We just returned from two weeks in Europe where we had a reunion with our German families, and then went on to visit and talk with people in Switzerland, France, more Germany, and Holland.  Here’s part of the laundry list that keeps Europeans up at night.

All EU countries are struggling with low to no economic growth, due mainly to over regulation and high taxes.  The future of indigenous Europe is hampered by devastating demographics which are characterized by a growing cohort of the ever more feeble and ailing elderly.  No country is close to delivering the 2.1 births per fertile woman required for mere stability of a population.  Germany is today at 1.2 which is equivalent to Russia’s alarming shrink rate.  The richer countries’ declining workforces are made up of an ever greater fraction of mid-easterners, Africans, and southeastern Europeans from poor countries such as Rumania and Bulgaria, who do jobs that northern Europeans refuse to do.

The specific concerns of such an influx of foreign migrants are themselves legion, starting with the loss of national identity, declining common culture and values, and rising crime rates.  The growing insular communities of Muslims across the northern EU present unique problems which individual governments have yet to figure out how to even recognize and discuss in politically correct ways, let alone making policies to address them effectively.

Being part of a formally united polyglot of nations, administered from Brussels and by the European Central Bank, has emerged as a whole new set of worries for Europeans.  Those countries with effective wealth producing societies are not happy to see their wealth redistributed to southern neighbors that have a history of dysfunctional economic policies and behaviors exercised within markedly different cultures.  And the southerners resent the remedial disciplines that the northerners want to impose.  This replicates on a nation-to-nation scale what we witness here between our economic classes dependent on government provided entitlements.

While environmentally conscious, Europeans have not been able to realize their climate change nostrums, and know that they will have to continue, if not increase, their use of fossil fuels and nuclear generators to contain the growth of their already sky-high energy prices.  The uncertainty of mid-east oil supplies and the economic blackmail threatened by Russia supplying natural gas are today a growing concern with no solution in sight.

Finally, the existential fact is that the EU cannot and/or is not willing to defend itself from neighbors seeking to restore their empires or insidiously invade through emigration.  Since WW2 the continent has relied on America’s military being the shield under which free Europe was able to recover, grow, and even prosper.  Having lived for decades in the succoring shade of America, which President Trump has promised to revamp in his effort to make Europe more self-sufficient and sustainable, the EU is now completely dependent on our alliance.  Europeans today rightly worry that America is coming to the end of its willingness to spend its political capital and treasure to unconditionally defend NATO countries that even refuse to live up to their pledges to spend a minimum of 2% GDP on defense.

Contrary to leftwing propaganda that promotes our adoption of Europe’s socialism, America’s unease is politicized and manufactured at home.  And compared to Europe, this narrative has little existential basis to claim that it’s caused by factors not under our control.  In the final analysis, Americans are much more sanguine and satisfied about our ability to continue securing our quality of life than are the shrinking populations of indigenous Europeans.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  Just a couple of quick notes.  An example of the kind of anti-American propaganda about unhappy Americans is provided by our favorite (proto?) communist Umair Haque, who writes a remarkably ignorant and fallacious ‘Why Are Europeans (So Much) Happier Than Americans?’

It also turns out that Europe’s national healthcare systems have tiered death committees.  There’s the big national one that sets overall policy and rules as to who gets treated for what, and who gets left to die.  Then at regional/local levels there are the next level death committees who may impose additional restrictions on treatments that depend on the availability of resources (all national healthcare programs are underfunded and use various stratagems to minimize/eliminate services that entail minimal political cost). This does lead to some gaming as the ill attempt to move into other jurisdictions in order to have a chance at staying alive.  All this is done on the nascent (desperate?) belief that local decision making better allocates locally scarce resources.  What a concept?

Such desperate moves to return to freer markets is also now quietly being reinstituted by Maduro in Caracas to alleviate shortages and provide heretofore unavailable goods in order to assuage a very victimized population that has now lived under a socialist and ruinous command economy for years.

[25sep19 update]  The comment stream of my 21sep19 column in The Union contained a couple of thoughtful criticisms along with the usual mindless responses from our leftwing.  The prime was that I drew a general conclusion based on my own anecdotal data.  Indeed I did, but it was anecdotal data that supports and is supported by broader surveys (here and here)  First to note is that I did not explicitly base my conclusion on ‘happiness’ since I have trouble understanding what survey questionnaires mean by that overused term.  I sidestepped and offered my concluding opinion on ‘sanguinity’ and ‘satisfaction’ with life which is much easier to interpret.

But if we want to get specific and quantitative about the matter, then I ask you to consider the above cited Eurofound’s ‘Quality of Life’ survey and the UN’s global ‘Happiness Report’.  With the usual caveats of comparing the results of different surveys, we find that the EU’s average ‘happiness and life satisfaction’ rating is 7.4/10 = 74%.  From the UN, with no maximum revealed, we learn that the US overall global rating at 6.886 is 90.2% of their top rating of 7.632 (Finland).  All the countries that are ‘happier’ than the US are much smaller to tiny compared to America’s population.

America is a country with large cohorts having distinct cultures and widely varying economic expectations due to the mostly the enormous yet unrealized opportunities for generating wealth that America provides.  Small homogeneous countries with lower expectations can naturally be found to be more satisfied with their lots in life.  I have found that liberals ignore such nuanced considerations in order to support their anti-American narrative.  But I invite the reader to dig deeper into both surveys before dismissing my conclusion which is based on much more than the corroborating anecdotal experiences we encountered on our latest trip to Europe.

Comments

[J. Barron]

I enjoyed the distillation of your socio/political experiences. Thank you for taking the time to report.

[Russ]

Thanks, George, always look forward to your insights to what is happening in the neighborhoods and discussed at the dinner table. These are the real issues of the day.

[Bill Tozer]

With the incessant negative drum beat coming from much of the media, it’s not difficult to assume that most Americans believe that our nation’s best days are behind us. However, that sentiment, while understandable, doesn’t appear to comport with a recent survey. According to a new Scott Rasmussen poll, the majority of Americans (59%) believe that the nation’s best days are ahead of her. Even more strikingly, “65% believe positive change in America begins outside of politics.”

Rasmussen further notes, “There is no gender gap on these attitudes” and “the views are shared across generational, racial, partisan and ideological lines.” This news is a breath of fresh air given just how negative the mainstream media’s coverage of the nation has been following President Donald Trump’s election victory.

And the reason for this majority optimism may be found in the fact that the majority of Americans are simply not obsessed with national news, especially since it has become so politically focused. As Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw speculates, “It sounds like a lot of the country is tuning all of this stuff out. Those of us caught up in the 24/7 news cycle may have this thrust in our faces on an hourly basis, but there are other Americans who simply aren’t being all that affected. You might even have seen them. They’re the ones outside on sunny days mowing their lawns, enjoying a cold beverage on the porch with a neighbor or heading out to the ballpark or the fishing hole. You know… those kinds of weirdos.”

Ronald Reagan infectiously shared his optimistic vision and hope for our nation when he famously asserted, “America’s best days are yet to come. Our proudest moments are yet to be. Our most glorious achievements are just ahead.”

https://patriotpost.us/articles/65560-majority-of-americans-believe-the-future-is-bright?utm_campaign=debounce&utm_content=read_more&utm_medium=web&utm_source=patriotpost.us

[Randy]

Surprising (NOT) lack of commentary for this post from the excessively vocal "leftinistas" that frequently comment here. Dr. Rebane please keep up your insightful commentary and glad you made it back safe and sound!

[Bill Tozer]

Is England still part of Europe?

“Historically, Britain has looked more upon the seas and the New World than eastward to Europe. In that transatlantic sense, a Canadian or American typically had more in common with an Englander than did a German or Greek.

Over the last 30 years, the British nearly forgot that fact as they merged into the European Union and pledged to adopt European values in a shared trajectory to supposed utopia.

To the degree that England remained somewhat suspicious of EU continentalism by rejecting the euro and not embracing European socialism, the country thrived. But when Britain followed the German example of open borders, reversed the market reforms of Margaret Thatcher, and adopted the pacifism and energy fantasies of the EU, it stagnated.

Johnson’s efforts as the new prime minister ostensibly are to carry out the will of the British people as voiced in 2016, against the wishes of the European Union apparat and most of the British establishment. But after hundreds of years of rugged independence, will Britain finally merge into Europe, or will it retain its singular culture and grow closer to the English-speaking countries it once founded — which are doing better than most of the members of the increasingly regulated and anti-democratic European Union.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/england-europe-never-fully-integrated/