Europe is a scary mirror

Jim Wooten retires July 1 but will write one column a week and a blog on ajc.com. This spring, the AJC conducted a public search for a new conservative columnist. Kyle Wingfield, an editorial writer for the European edition of the Wall Street Journal, debuts his first column today. Kyle, raised in Dalton, is a graduate of UGA’s Grady College.

Here’s a promise from me: I, the new guy, though I have spent the last 4 1/2 years in ye olde Europe, will not prattle on and on about my time there.

Except today.

I have had a number of life experiences that shape the way I look at the world. For instance, my grandmother still talks about growing up on a Tennessee farm during the Depression and watching her father have to kill newborn piglets, even though other folks were starving, because of an FDR diktat. My stint in Belgium is the most recent of these view-shaping experiences.

While my time in Europe has been wonderful, I’m ready to go home. My fear is that the European mentality will be waiting for me when I get there.

There is a move afoot in the United States to import a Continental concept of government and its domineering relationship with citizens. The liberals’ wish list of taxpayer-funded health care, massive state intervention in markets, radical environmental policies, a secular public square, and reinvigorated labor unions is nothing short of a complete overhaul of America as we know it.

It is not being sold as such. The message is that 98 percent of us will only gain from the revolution, with “the rich” somehow footing the bill. This flies in the face of both statistics and evidence.

Europeans have smaller cars, but also fewer cars. They may have “free” health care, but even middle-class families often pay more than 50 percent of their incomes in taxes. Their markets may not be caricatured as Wild West capitalism the way ours are, but to be a consumer in Europe is to know what the word “rip-off” means — in pricing, in choice, in service.

There is no such thing as the “European social model” because every nation is different. What they all have in common, though, is that they have spent the last decade or longer trying to move away from the very kind of system we Americans may be on the verge of adopting.

They are doing so because it’s simply unsustainable. Margaret Thatcher’s dictum still holds true: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”.

What European governments are finding, however, is that reversing that process is very, very difficult. Entitlements can’t be reformed away overnight. And once government is made out to be the savior, and the private sector a necessary evil, it’s difficult to persuade citizens otherwise.

I won’t pretend that America’s way is never messy. The private sector made real mistakes that helped cause the current financial crisis. But bankers could not have created so much havoc on their own. At every step, government amplified the private sector’s errors with its own policy failures — that goes for the Bush and Clinton administrations alike. (And, it seems, the nascent Obama one.)

To say that more government is the answer is to ignore government’s mistakes, in our recent past as well as in all state-heavy systems. Like Europe’s.

I won’t dwell on my European experience, even if it shapes my thinking. But know this: When I first moved to Belgium, I felt I was stepping back in time a few years. I shudder to think that I was actually looking at America’s future.

Kyle Wingfield’s column resumes May 24 after his move. He can be reached at kwingfield@ajc.com.