This humble essay is based on a simple fact that we might all find a bit fascinating, and the reasons why it happened. The fact in front of us is this: The Euro is now worth $1.47 and still rising fast. To see this over the last five years, take a gander at the currency translation chart:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=EURUSD=X&t=5y

It’s largely a reflection of something else: as of the end of 2006, the USofA is no longer the largest economy in the world. The Eurozone has passed us by at a score of about $13.8T to $13.6T. For the first time in my life, and possibly in my parents’ life, the USofA is not #1. More interestingly, no one except me has said anything about it.

How has this happened? After all, if you have a conversation in a bar about the virtues of Europe, it typically comes down something like this:

They have socialized medicine, and that’s not cheap.
They have all these worker protection laws that make it impossible to run a business.
They spend a lot of public money on “sustainable energy” programs and stuff like that.
They aren’t as innovative.

All of the usual blather belies the simple fact that, as of right now, Europe is wealthier than we are in terms of their currency (about $1.20 to the Euro is par, according to the Big Mac index) and getting wealthier. Is it possible that the usual bar talk is just wrong? Consider this:

They spend about half as much per capita on health care as we do.
Our fluid workforce has also created a wave of job loss and foreclosures that destroyed the real estate market.
Europeans consume half as much energy per capita as we do.
They have invented some amazing things, including high speed rail and many key pharmaceuticals.

So is it possible that those Socialist Europeans are beating the USofA because they have a better way to run things? Well, yes, it is – especially when you consider that the Eurozone is hardly “socialist” at all.

There is a huge difference between running an economy so that everyone gets the same amount of money for a day’s work and having a government that takes the initiative to make the capitalist system work more efficiently. If you look at where European governments spend a lot of money, it’s in the areas of health care and public infrastructure. We spend oodles more on both of these items when you look at all the public and private expenditures combined.

Is Big Gummint just an intrusion into our lives that we must fight back? Not if it’s clearly an investment that responds to what the economy needs. Why on earth is it the purvey of an employer to provide health care? Requirements like this only limit the demand for qualified workers and go against stable, long term employment. Taking this massive expense off the balance sheet of business and putting it on the gummint is not “Socialism”, it’s simply good sense.

Of course, many people may not believe this. They may want to see some kind of experiment run to see how the results come out. If that’s they way you’d like to go, well, please start reading this post over from the start. Thanks.

A good government in this post-industrial age is one that provides the infrastructure needed to make the economy as stable as possible over the long haul. Energy independence is a good part of that, and European governments are way ahead of us on that score. Oil price hikes affect them half as much as they do the USofA. That’s part of what we’re seeing here.

Of course, the European nations are not deeply embroiled in an expensive and endless war at this time, so the experiment is not completely clean. There are externalities. But I think we can see that their way of going is at the very least not a bad one. We can learn a lot from it, in fact. If nothing else, we can figure out how they get that 5+ weeks of vacation every year.