The Liberty Papers

Over at Atlas Blogged, writer Rammage talks about America as the bankroll of European socialism. In the post, he talks about a book by Mark Steyn called America Alone, where Mark discusses the leading role that the American Centers For Disease Control take when it comes to world health issues.

When SARS leapt from China to infect Toronto’s hospitals in 2003, the principal contribution of the WHO (World Health Organization) was to issue a travel advisory warning visitors to steer clear of Ontario, leaving it to the CDC to provide advanced and practical analysis of the problem. Toronto’s mayor, Mel Lastman, had a hard time keeping track of all the acronyms, and in one press conference launched into a bitter attack on the damaging effects of the travel advisory issues by the CDC.

The doctor next to him tried to correct him: “Who,” she said.
“The CDC,” he repeated.
“Who,” she said.
“The CDC,” he repeated, wondering why she hadn’t heard his answer to the question the first time. This diseased version of the Abbott and Costello routine went on a while longer, before the doc realized she had to spell it out: W-H-O, the World Health Organization..
“Oh yeah. Them, too,” said [Lastman].

Yet under the who’s-on-first shtick lay an important truth: if an infection shows up in an Atlanta hospital, no American doctor looks for guidance from a Canadian government agency. But if it shows up in a Toronto hospital, the Ontario health system takes it for granted that the best minds of the CDC in Atlanta will be staying late at the office trying to work out what’s going on.

It got me to thinking (the gears were spinning, smoke out my ears)… Technological progress overwhelmingly occurs in countries with free markets and property rights. America is the largest and most well established of such countries. Thus, for many decades, America has been the world’s leader in technology and innovation. Mark Steyn points out that this is partly due to America— in effect— subsidizing their health care by being the developing center for new drugs and by being the hit team for health crises. But I think it’s far wider.

Now, European socialist countries don’t see themselves undergoing negative economic growth. They don’t have the same levels of growth that the American economy enjoys, but most of their democratic socialist regimes are at least growing. But what would happen if the American economy performed the same way as, say, communist Russia?

America is not just the health care trailblazer and military superpower of the world, we also are the technological leader. Look at the automobile, the telephone, the radio, the television, transistors, the personal computer, the internet, and now nanotechnology, all invented or heavily popularized in the United States. And, as pointed out time and time again, it’s property rights, the rule of law, and capitalism that are the engine of that innovation.

Would Europe be where it is today without the American economy providing the basis for the economic growth they’ve undergone? They’ve been able to eviscerate their own defense forces, relying on the American military machine. They’ve been able to plunder their own economies in order to fund their welfare states, relying on American innovation to ensure that their standard of living will rise. I think they wouldn’t have had a chance at keeping up their economic growth if it weren’t for our growth. Our growth relies on limited government and regulation, which wouldn’t be acceptable to the “enlightened” nations across the pond. In essence, they’ve been having our cake and eating it too.

The old adage says that a rising tide lifts all boats. I’m not afraid of China, because they may help the tide rise. Europe, while they decry American “cold-hearted capitalism”, are benefiting from the rising tide we provide. In fact, I don’t even worry that Europe benefits from the economic growth we provide, while condemning us for it. What bothers me is when Americans use the European welfare state as a model for what we should do, without realizing that without our capitalist system, the European welfare state would have collapsed decades ago.