> The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the
> American standard of living, and it's sliding. European output per
> capita is less than that of 46 of the 50 American states and about on
> par with Arkansas. There is little prospect of robust growth returning
> any time soon.
>
I yield to none in my hatred for David Brooks, but he presents all the standard neo-liberal arguments in his 6/2 NYT column, and I think we should know how to answer them.
First, the distortions of reality. Doug and many others could do a much better job of exposing the misleading figures in the above excerpt, but even a statistical cretin like me can notice: 1) that "the Western European standard of living" is a vague notion. Does it refer to per capita income, per capita GDP, or maybe a broader index of social well being like the Genie? Brooks doesn't specify. And, whatever measure he's using, he seems to be lumping together richer countries like France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland with poorer ones like Italy, Spain and Portugal. What, for instance, would be the composite per capita income or GDP of France and the Netherlands, the two countries that actually voted the constitution down? 2) Note that Brooks cites output per capita as opposed to the more commonly referred-to notion of labor productivity. This is because productivity (output per worker hour) is actually higher in France (and I believe Germany) than in the US. The only reason US per capita output is higher is because Americans work much longer hours (what Marx associated with an increase in absolute, as opposed to relative, surplus value). This simply testifies to the relative power of American capital vis a vis labor, not "entrepreneurial know-how."
But these dishonesties aside, I think there are a couple larger points to be made. I wish, first of all, that people would cease this nonsensical talk about American v. European "models." There is greater social provision in most Western European countries, but not because anybody constructed it that way according to some consciously agreed-upon "model." The European ruling classes don't like the welfare state any better than their American counterparts. Europe simply evolved differently from America, because of the strength of its workers' movements and the intensity of its class struggles, combined with the fact that its capitalism arose in a pre-capitalist society, and free-market notions never became as pervasive.
Finally, I think leftists should stop trying to defend the welfare state on the basis that it makes capitalism work better. It usually doesn't. The aim of capitalism is profit, not the general welfare. Thus, when taxes on capital or the rich are raised to pay for social benefits in a given country, capital does tend to flow out. When workers are more secure in their jobs, capitalists do start figuring out ways to hire fewer of them, or hire them on temporary and part-time contracts. Using the wealth of society to better the lot of human beings, and using human beings to further the accumulation of wealth constitute two fundamentally different and, in the end, mutually exclusive logics. There is simply no getting around that, liberals and social dems to the contrary notwithstanding.
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