European Social Model: Stuck on Stupid!

The Financial Times has a brilliant piece of writing [regrettably pay-for-view] by its most readable and thoughtful commentary artist, Martin Wolf, who more in sorrow than in anger deconstructs the Nordic model using a Swedish think-tank as his mentor.

The statistics, overall, have Swedish government services declining in quality in the two areas that the maternal state-model the feminized Europeans prefer should excel in: health and education.

But Wolf goes much further, pointing out that all across Europe, the welfare state is beginning to destroy itself by its own internal contradictions. For instance, job security laws lower willingness to hire, which makes workers hang onto their jobs and not switch, and makes economic changes, especially imports, more threatening. [France's search for an indigenous "energy champion" when faced with a foreign buyer stands out as an example].

The lede of the story:The European state is maternal. It is protective, but also infantilizing in its services, which are available to all, but mediocre and inflexible.

High employment entry barriers, high wages and high taxes generate high levels of unemployment, leading to large blocs of unassimilated, unemployed immigrants who turn to criminality, rioting and social disorder.

Finally, the welfare state is a substitute for a committed father, depriving men and women of a motive for producing children who might provide for them in their old age. This leads to a reduced posterity on which the sustainability of the welfare state depends.

The results of the entire system are etched in total clarity: Europe caught up to the US in 1995 in average living standards, but has fallen back 20% in the last ten years.

The three countries investing least in percentage of public spending are also among the top four in the OECD in productivity growth in the last TEN years. [Ireland, S. Korea, USA]

You won't read about this in the New York Times or other US publications dedicated to the establishment of a welfare state on the European social model.