Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future.

• Author: Whaples, Robert
• Position: Book review

* Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future By Samuel Gregg New York: Encounter Books, 2013. Pp. xix, 363. $26.

If America were like western Europe, subscribers to the Independent Review might be advised to request that it be discreetly delivered to their post office boxes in a brown-paper wrapper. The ideas that Review subscribers cherish--economic freedom, small government, individual responsibility--are increasingly anathema in Europe. As Samuel Gregg explains it, the language and ideals of "solidarity" and "social justice" so permeate public discourse in Europe that "even minor attempts to reform its social welfare programs, let alone reduce the welfare state's size, are regarded by many Europeans as a heartless assault on the weak and marginalized, and a betrayal of the commitments widely associated with Social Europe" (p. 12).

To suggest that this decaying system is unsustainable invites ostracism. But the system is in decay, and Gregg's purposes are to explain how Europe entered this cul-de-sac, to warn that the United States is in danger of following it, and to explain how we can avoid this fate.

The facts that Gregg enumerates are sobering. European economic growth has slowed to a crawl. European Central Bank figures show that the average annual rate of economic growth in the Eurozone countries decelerated from 3.4 percent in the 1970s to 2.4 percent in the 1980s, 2.2 percent in the 1990s, and 1.1 percent from 2001 to 2009--in an era when economic growth burst forth across the rest of the world. It's not that many Europeans really need the extra money to buy life's necessities; rather, the problem is that this lack of economic growth is a symptom of deeper problems--the lack of incentives for businesses and entrepreneurs in Europe to innovate, the bloated costs imposed on them by the heavy hand of social regulations, and, most important, their inability to create jobs for the next generation. This disappearance of opportunities for younger people has caused youth unemployment rates to soar, averaging almost 25 percent throughout the European Union and surpassing 50 percent in Spain and Greece. As a consequence, many young people never have the chance to do meaningful work, to flourish, and simply to grow up and do adult things, such as starting a family.

Gregg argues that the root cause of this stagnation lies in Europe's economic culture, which is responsible for the suffocating...