“Any reporter who has covered Europe in the last decade has written a dozen articles or more,” The New York Times informs us, “about how one crisis or another has exposed the fundamental unsustainability of the European Union.”
I hadn’t noticed. Until recently, haven’t reporters and commentators been downplaying Europe’s looming crisis? But they cannot pretend “far right” separatist, decentralist and nationalist movements are marginal any longer, not after strong showings for Geert Wilders in The Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, and the Brexit vote.
Now everybody seems to be panicking.
Even the Times is half-predicting an end to what it calls the “European Experiment.”
The Times identifies the tension as arising from “calls for keeping out secondary migrants and demands to keep internal European borders open. It’s a version of the contradiction within the European Union itself: between an open union and a collection of sovereign states.”
Beneath all the brouhaha about freedom of movement across breached borders lies the real contradiction: between massive welfare states on the one hand and, on the other, freedom of movement, speech and all the rest.*
When governments offer freebies, they entice people into un-productive or at least sub-productive lifestyles. Which is not sustainable, especially when extensive. How many productive people must support how many unproductive people?
Then throw those domestic programs open to millions of migrants who lack even rudimentary language and First World skills? That’s how states subsidize their societies’ destruction.
Europe’s governments are way too big for their border breaches.
If you want traditional freedoms, you have to pare down government.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
*Between social democracy (socialism lite) and the old liberal order.
