Americans! Don't copy Europe!

Americans! Don't copy Europe!

Daniel Hannan
Telegraph.co.uk
September 27th, 2010

Barack Obama born in Kenya? Pah! If anything, he was born in Brussels. The policies his administration is pursuing amount to comprehensive Europeanisation: European carbon taxes, European foreign policy, European healthcare, European daycare, European disarmament, European industrial intervention and, inevitably, European unemployment rates.

If there are any Americans reading, I’ve got some bad news for you. I inhabit your future. As a Member of the European Parliament, I have spent eleven years working in precisely the kind of system that you seem intent on creating. Believe me, my friends, you won’t like it. As the greatest of all Englishmen puts it:

Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,
Lest child, child’s children, cry against you woe!

I’m not saying that everything in the US is good and everything in the EU is bad, far from it. It’s just that the aspects of Euro-politics which your rulers seem most intent on copying are those which have demonstrably failed: the centralisation of power, higher state spending, welfare dependency, excessive regulation.

Why does this model fail? Why does the current administration seem so drawn to it? Is there still time to turn aside? Can US conservatives get their act together? Will the Tea Party succeed? Is there such a thing as American exceptionalism? Why does the success of the US matter to Britain? I address these and other questions in The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America, out tomorrow.

All I've been sayin...

Seeing as the Telegraph is profoundly anti-EU, I expect no less from them. Of course there are always merits to saying that what works for you doesn't work for us and vice versa but of course an anti-EU writer for an anti-EU newspaper is only going to show you the worst (the media are rarely interested in reporting the news these days, so much easier to just appeal to the prejudices of your readership). A similar article in The Independent for example might be quite different in extolling the virtues of being in the the glorious EU and ignoring the negative.

Ain't opinion pieces great?

I still enjoy opinions from people across the pond even if i disagree with it.

Generally I dislike opinion pieces for how incredibly selective they are.