[Jerrek]

Lets dig a little deeper and go to fascism.

http://denbeste.nu/external/Zinmeister01.html

The European press labeled our President a "murderer" for allowing the execution of Timothy McVeigh. Euro politicians and reporters have taken to casually calling Americans "toxic," "thugs," "imperialists," and "gangsters." In 2001, Europeans conspired to get the U.S. removed from the U.N. Human Rights Commission, offering our seat instead to Sudan and Libya, those paragons of liberty. European politicians have recently attacked and undercut the U.S. on North Korea, on the Middle East, over the Afghan war, about prisoners at Guantanamo, at multiple environmental conclaves, regarding the International Criminal Court, in scores of trade battles, on missile defense, and at other occasions too numerous to count. SchrÃÃâ€*’¶der simply fanned this flame to revive his faltering campaign.

For everyday, non-political Americans, Europe is simply not a preoccupation one way or the other. It is Canada with castles, as one acquaintance puts it--a nice place, but hardly the furnace where our future will be forged. Given our fundamental belief that each person and nation should be free to solve their own problems, average Americans are perfectly content to have Europeans go their own way. If the Euros think welfare statism and E.U. regulation is their ticket to prosperity, they're welcome to try. If they believe they're safer without a ballistic missile shield than with one, we say Godspeed to them.

If Europeans want to ban the death penalty, that's fine with Americans; but don't ask us to follow the same dictate. If Europeans think selling military technology to North Korea and Iran, and helping Libya and Iraq with their oil industries is a good idea, expect not a shred of support from the U.S. If Europeans believe their determination to send billions of dollars to Yasser Arafat is likely to speed peace in the Middle East, we won't stop them.

If enough of these divergences accumulate, however, Americans may eventually be forced to conclude that, as economist Irwin Stelzer has put it, many European nations "are ceasing, or may have already ceased, to be our friends."

The U.S. has also decentralized physically, with new nodes of power and wealth sprouting all across our continent. Outlying cities like Charlotte, Fargo, Phoenix, Austin, Manchester, and Omaha have become economic dynamos. Widened prosperity and new communication technologies have made it possible for America's most productive workers to live where they choose. The U.S. is completely unlike European states--where power is almost always concentrated in one great city. If you want to be part of the action in France, you must be in Paris; in England, it's London. In America, by contrast, people and wealth are increasingly dispersed throughout the country. We may hope that entry into the E.U. of the Eastern Europeans (who have experienced the dark side of statism) will moderate Europe's centralizing mania, but that remains to be seen.

First economics. We have conventionally thought of Europe as having about the same standard of living as Americans. This is less and less true. For the European Union as a whole, GDP per capita is presently less than two thirds of U.S. levels. America's poorest sub-groups, like African Americans, now have higher average income levels than the typical European.

What's behind this? For one thing, Americans work harder: 72 percent of the U.S. population is at work, compared to only 58 percent in the E.U. American workers also put in more hours. And U.S. workers are more productive--an E.U. worker currently produces 73 cents worth of output in the same period of time a U.S. worker creates a dollar's worth.

Over the long haul, these sorts of disparities add up to crunching economic divergences. Since 1970, America has produced 57 million new jobs. The E.U. nations, with an even bigger population, have produced 5 million (most of them with the government). A startling 40 percent of the unemployed in Europe have been out of work for more than a year, compared to only 6 percent in the U.S.

At the same time they've bet the farm on swiss-cheese treaties, the Europeans have pared their military spending to the point where the entire continent now has approximately the same force-projecting power as the Swiss navy. (See our lead item in SCAN documenting the collapse of our allies' strength.) American military spending now totals more than the next nine largest national defense budgets combined. Even more significantly, the U.S. now pays for almost 80 percent of the world's military R & D.

Without admitting it, the Europeans have essentially decided to rely on the U.S. to keep them safe. American taxpayers are paying to build a missile defense system, an unchallengeable air force, and a fleet of 13 separate supercarriers with attendant air wings and naval battle groups. Europeans are concentrating on producing richer foie gras, art museums, and corporate subsidies. They could do much more to help guard the West without straining themselves/

Today the respective positions are very different. The U.S. now produces 30 percent of global GDP; as recently as the late 1980s the figure was just 22 percent. Fully half of all Internet traffic takes place in America. Three quarters of all Nobel laureates in science, medicine, and economics have lived and worked in the U.S. in recent decades. Given the very different population trends on either side of the Atlantic, America's lead will only widen in the future.

And that, everyone, is the difference between the United States and Europe, and why the rest of the world hates us.