European Delusion

Mrs. Leonidas is a Swedish citizen and has been participating in a "discussion" thread hosted by a newspaper on the northern part of that country. The participants demonstrate an astonishingly distorted perception of the U.S. e.g. pervasive poverty, raceism, crime and corruption. They are daily exposed to a level of anti "Anglo Saxon" society propaganda that literally boggles the mind in its sovietescness. This situation is apparently common throughout much of Europe where true unemployment hovers above 20%.

This fall in status in Europe has resulted in a rise in envy and often an irrational dislike of the outside world (much of it directed at the U.S.). Many Europeans are in denial about the failures of their socialist or "social market models." All too many are woefully ignorant about the reasons for economic growth or failure. Europe is strangling itself in bureaucracy and killing incentives through excessive taxation. Now the Germans and French are trying to infect the new free market economies in Eastern Europe with this status flu.

Many in the European ruling elite put down pro-growth policies by disdainfully referring to them as the "Anglo-Saxon model."

The U.S. government ought to wage an aggressive information campaign in Europe to offset many factual misrepresentations about the U.S. in the European press -- particularly in health care, levels of poverty, schooling, crime, justice, etc. By almost any measure, though far from perfect, the U.S. comes out better than much of Europe.



The vaccine for economic flu is economic literacy. European (and other) economic education organizations have been dispensing the vaccine, but their resources are too meager to stop the spread of economic ignorance. Americans have in general greater economic literacy, and hence have been less infected by economic flu, because private individuals and businesses have understood it is both their responsibility and in their long-run interest to support economic education programs run by nongovernment organizations.

If Europeans were as familiar with the teachings of Hayek as those of Karl Marx, most of their economic problems would disappear.»