VIDEO: Europe's War on Free Speech

(H/T: Tundra Tabloids.)

Eutopia. Eusocial. Europe.

by Smitty

Ross, I love you nearly as much as I love your ivory tower. Let's have some fun with The Case For Small Government:

At bottom, I think the argument suffers from a problem that's common to both sides in the debates over the desirability of European-style social democracy - namely, the hope that what's ultimately a philosophical and moral controversy can have a tidy empirical resolution.

Is the Decline and Fall of Europe insufficient for you? Are shenanigans like the Treaty of Lisbon not a good enough indicator? Do you read The Brussels Journal? My wife is German. Maybe I am too lost in anecdotal evidence that the likelihood of success of "European-style social democracy" in the US has been captured here: It Won't Work. Uless you're eusocial.

In both cases, there's an unwarranted hope that the right facts and figures can settle a debate that ultimately depends on the philosophical assumptions that you bring to it.

Hogwash. Facts matter. As does history. If the foundation of your eutopian la-la land rests upon demonstrably bogus assertions about your demographics, WTF good is it? Unless you're taking a foppish deconstructionist route, that is. Then you can just "feel" something.

I would just deny that they can come close to settling, in any meaningful sense, the debate over how big the American welfare state should be overall, and whether we should copy Western Europe or disdain it.

And why should you? Recall, These United States are still 50 in number. If you have any sort of bully pulpit from your lofty heights, you should argue the Constitution, and the right of states to be as "Massachusetts" as they wanna be, without taking the whole country down roads that historically lead to swamps.

That's because both the American and the European models of government are successful in purely practical terms, to the extent that purely practical terms exist - which is to say, both models have provided, over an extended period of time, levels of prosperity and stability unparalleled in human history.

PAX ROMANA, anyone? Or are you taking the condescending view that history began in 1636, with the founding of Hah-vuhd?

(Yes, the stresses that Islamic immigration and demographic decline are imposing on Europe are real and serious - but I think it's too soon to say, with Murray and many on the Right, that "the European model can't continue to work much longer," full stop. The end of history may be more resilient than we think!)

Don't look at reality too long, buddy: someone might steal your lenses. No, you're right: Geert's just paranoid and stuff.

And as long as this remains the case, where you come out on the debates over whether we should prefer the continent's sturdier safety nets to America's lower unemployment and higher growth rates (or the continent's more equible provision of health care to America's lead in health-care innovation, or what-have-you) will ultimately boil down to values as much as it will to what the numbers say.

Back to my European in-laws: that "sturdier safety net" has little empirical meaning. Then again, I'm only talking to a small sample, so you could be right. Not that I seriously think so, just that sounding too certain is rather tacky. Oh, and the wife works in pharma, and is unenthusiastic about the "lead in health-care innovation" you're touting here. I wouldn't play a straight libertarian hand, but I would say "less is more" when it comes to regulation. Each new law is another bandage on the patient. Governments rarely, if ever, cut away any of the old stuff. Result: mummy. But we'll just have to crash the system and then see what you dreamers can do to continue blaming Bush rather than analyze anything.

How much do you prize equality and ease of life? The more you do, the more you'll favor a European approach to the relationship between state and society. How much do you prize voluntarism, entrepreneurship, and the value of lives oriented around service to one's family, and to God?

Oh, step up to the plate and just admit it: in Socialism, the state is God. At some point, however, even the biggest Einstein must tire of the failures of idolizing the state.

Eutopia. Eusocial. Europe. You go, dude. There.

Video of the Year?

On "Hannity & Colmes," Gerard Baker does a dramatic reading of his Times of London column about Obama's foreign trip, "He Ventured Forth to Bring Light to the World":

Obama's European shark jump

From my latest American Spectator column:

Team Obama's difficulty in finding a suitable site for his Berlin speech is unlikely to get much attention from the TV news anchors traveling with the candidate this week. Yet it highlights the fundamental problem of Obama overseas excursion: It is a purely symbolic gesture from a campaign that increasingly seems more interested in symbols than substance.

Please read the whole thing. Meanwhile, Obama's already put his foot in his mouth once, telling CBS he expects to be president for "eight to 10 years":

Link: sevenload.com. (Via Hot Air.) ABC's Jake Tapper observes:

The notion that Obama will be dealing with world leaders for eight-to-ten years, possibly up through July 2018, suggests that either (a) he believes that not only will he be elected and re-elected, but the 22nd amendment will be repealed and he will be elected for a third term, OR (b) he was speaking casually and just meant two terms. . . .
This week Obama will have his words picked apart like never before, and it will be an international audience of not just opponents but actual enemies.

Watch out for that shark, Fonz!

UPDATE: A German correspondent notices that Team Obama is trying to keep European reporters away from the candidate, prompting the Big Johnson to muse:

[H]is staff is desperately worried that the candidate will make a gaffe, as soon as he ventures into uncharted territory. Foreign reporters tend to ask questions about ... you know ... foreign stuff.

Obama facing tough questions? Unthinkable.

Obama's symbolic problem

Barack Obama's foreign trip is, as multiple press accounts affirm, "aimed at bolstering his foreign policy credentials" (CNN) and "an effort to look presidential on the world stage" (Chicago Tribune). In other words, a symbolic gesture -- and it might help Team Obama to choose their symbols wisely:

Barack Obama, when he arrives in Berlin on July 24, will hold his speech at the Siegessäule monument in the heart of the city. . . .
The Siegessäule -- or Victory Column -- was erected in memory of Prussia's victories over Denmark (1864), Austria (1866) and France (1870/71). The column originally stood in front of the Reichstag, Germany's parliament building, but was moved by Adolf Hitler to its current location in 1939 to make way for his planned transformation of Berlin into the Nazi capital "Germania."
"The Siegessäule in Berlin was moved to where it is now by Adolf Hitler. He saw it as a symbol of German superiority and of the victorious wars against Denmark, Austria and France," the deputy leader of the Free Democrats, Rainer Brüderle, told Bild am Sonntag. He raised the question as to "whether Barack Obama was advised correctly in his choice of the Siegessäule as the site to hold a speech on his vision for a more cooperative world."
Andreas Schockenhoff of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats said, "the Siegessäule in Berlin is dedicated to a victory over neighbors who are today our European friends and allies. It is a problematic symbol."

(Via Hot Air.) Congratulations on your tasteful gesture, Team Obama. Welcome to your Dukakis tank ride. Obama-Eagleton '08!

UPDATE: Discerning Texan at Astute Bloggers:

I cynically commented the other day that the only thing missing from Obama's German "rally" was Albert Speer; now I'm not so sure I wasn't actually on to something...

Directed by Leni Riefenstahl?

'Children are expensive'

Peter Robinson offers an explanation of the demographic death-spiral of Europe:

Children are expensive, and they require a sacrifice of time and interest by parents. ... Prof. Thornton says Europeans are not reproducing because “the dolce vita lifestyle does not include children.” A Europe that is drawn to instant pleasure has little interest in investing in either children or the future of the Europe.

That's a major point, and might be a sufficient explanation if the demographic decline was only an upper- and middle-class phenomenon, but it's not. Probably the most startling cultural shift in Europe over the past 40 years is the disappearance of large families among the working class, where big broods were once commonplace. (If you've seen Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, you may recall the hilarious image of the Yorkshire woman with so many children she doesn't even notice the birth of another.)

Childlessness may be relatively rare among working-class and poor women, but it is no longer common for such women to have four or more children, as was quite customary in the past. The fact that the birth rate has declined sharply even among the European poor (and the trends are similar in America, even if the decline has not been so drastic) indicates that Professor Thornton's dolce vita explanation is insufficient.

Many other factors might be cited. The use of oral contraceptives -- "The Pill" was viewed with some moral skepticism back in the '60s and '70s -- has now become widespread, even among women raised in Catholic homes, and condom use has also become much more common.

One factor in declining birth rates that is seldom discussed is increased practice of surgical sterilization. In the United States, tubal ligation -- surgery that renders a woman permanently infertile -- is now the most common method of contraception in America. (You can look it up.)

Understand that most of the women who undergo tubal ligation already have children, and the fact is that the OB-GYN community actually encourages such surgery once a woman has two children -- the "two and tie 'em" mentality.

When my wife was pregnant with our twin sons (we already had a daughter), her OB-GYN tried to pitch her this way: "You know, if you want to get your tubes tied, it's cheaper to do it at the time of delivery and your insurance will cover it. If you wait until later and do it as a separate procedure, it's more expensive." My wife managed to maintain her composure in the doctor's office, but by the time she got home, she was crying: "It was like he was telling me I'm not a good mother and I shouldn't have any more kids!"

I resisted the urge to do what I should have done, but I guess the headline "Journalist Beats Local Physician Into Coma" wouldn't have been so good for my career.

The fact that such "helpful" advice has become standard practice typifies the kind of culture shift that underlies the demographic changes that Peter Robinson and Professor Thornton seek to explain. Fifty years ago, most women would have recoiled with horror at the thought of undergoing surgery that would render them permanently infertile. But years of careful work by the obstetrics community have steadily increased the acceptance of this practice. Once most OB-GYNs became active agents of the population-control agenda, it was hard to find an "expert" voice to oppose that agenda.

Of course, it's not just about OB-GYNs and contraception. The culture shift is everywhere. Young people, especially, seem to just take it for granted now that the maximum number of children is two. And since almost no one nowadays has four or more children -- you should see people's faces when I tell them my wife and I have six -- the possibility of having that many kids strikes most young people as some kind of science-fiction fantasy, like flying to Mars. They can't even imagine it.

So while I think that the dolce vita factor -- the desire for leisure and luxury -- has some role in the demographic decline of Europe, I think this problem is deeper, wider and more generalized in the culture. It took a long time for this anti-family culture to take root, and if it is ever to be uprooted, that too will take a long time.

Oh, one more thing: Children are not expensive, not really. The notion that children are massively expensive is rooted in certain modern middle-class conceptions of what is necessary to childhood.

For example, many people think that it is absolutely essential that their children be raised in an owner-occupied single-family detached home in a "good neighborhood" with "good schools." When our oldest child was born in 1989, we lived in a small $300-a-month rental home, and then moved to a $275-a-month apartment. Our next address, in 1992, just before the twins were born, was a house we bought for less than $33,000 in a blue-collar neighborhood. Then in late 1997 we moved to the DC area, where we lived in a 3-bedroom apartment for five years as our next three children were born. Then in 2003 we moved into faculty housing on the campus of a Christian school.

So, no, children are not expensive. What is expensive are the material expectations of the suburban middle class -- and screw all that. I'd rather have six kids.