It is almost customary for Republican politicians and conservative commentators to accuse their Democratic counterparts of wanting to usher in socialism or communism. This, of course, is untrue. The Biden administration, despite its many flaws, is not planning to seize the means of production or abolish private property. Democrats are instead seeking to turn America into a European-style welfare state. It is thus imperative for conservatives to study carefully these European societies. In Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent, David Harsanyi demonstrates in devastating detail how misguided the Left’s idolization of Europe really is.
Harsanyi begins by analyzing Scandinavian economic history, drawing on the excellent work of the Swedish economist Nima Sanandaji, the son of Kurdish immigrants to the country. Sweden achieved its high standard of living prior to the introduction of its massive welfare state; by 1970, it was the fourth richest country in the world. From the 1970s to 1995, however, its economy stagnated due to the dramatic increase in the size and scope of its government. By the 1990s, parties across the Swedish political spectrum began to roll back its welfare system and introduce some American-style economic reforms: cutting taxes, adopting voucher systems for schools, privatizing industries, and encouraging competition. The inheritance tax, which was 65% in 1970, was abolished, as was the wealth tax.
To prove that the American Left’s desire for a European-style welfare-state is misguided, Harsanyi analyzes immigrant integration, a major Democratic Party imperative, in Sweden. It is indisputable that the United States is much more effective than Sweden at integrating immigrants. In 2019, immigrant unemployment (3.1 percent) was lower in the United States than overall unemployment (3.7 percent), while it was more than twice the rate (15.5 percent) of overall unemployment (6.8 percent) in Sweden. Sanandaji notes that in 2010 the employment rate of people born in Somalia was merely 21 percent in Sweden, as compared to 54 percent in the United States. The Swedish economist Benny Carlson has argued that the relative success of Somalis in the United States stems from its smaller safety net, which incentivizes work, and the lack of onerous labor regulations. Harsanyi explains the high crime rates and the rise of Islamic extremism in Europe’s immigrant populations as a function of poor integration, while simultaneously pointing out that even undocumented immigrants in the United States are half as likely as the average U.S. citizen to be arrested for committing a violent crime.
The extensive welfare programs of European states also inspire fraudulent behavior among their citizens. In the 1980s, around 80 percent of Swedes agreed with the statement that “claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled is never justifiable,” but by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. Beginning in the 1990s about 20 percent of Sweden’s working-age population relied on unemployment, sick leave, or early retirement benefits for their economic well-being, and the budget for government-paid sick leave exceeded the military and education budgets combined.
Harsanyi dispels much of the misinformation regarding taxation and social programs in European welfare states. In the United States, Democrats have put forth the notion that the wealthy’s aversion to paying its fair share is the main obstacle to creating a European-style welfare state. It’s true that European countries collect more in taxes: the average tax-to-GDP rate is 38–47 percent for western European Union members, as compared to only 26 percent for the United States. But Europeans pay for their expansive welfare states through substantially higher taxes on the middle class instead of on the rich. For example, all income over $56,517 in Sweden is subject to a marginal tax rate of 52.5 percent, while this income level falls in the 22 percent federal tax bracket in the United States. Denmark’s top statutory personal income tax rate of 55.9 percent applies to all income over 1.3 times the average income, and introducing such a policy in the United States would cause all income over $70,000 to be taxed at 55.9 percent. Corporate tax rates, which progressives want to increase, are similar in the European Union and in the United States. By contrast, value-added taxes/sales taxes, criticized for their regressive nature by the American Left, average 21 percent in the European Union and around 25 percent in Scandinavia, as compared to 6.6 percent in the United States (source: TaxFoundation.org).
Harsanyi also examines the issues behind funding nationalized healthcare. His analysis of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) shows that the system is forced to keep costs down by rationing care and that it has been cutting access to routine procedures such as hernia repair, cataract removal, and hip and knee replacements. In one instance, the NHS initially told elderly patients with wet age-related macular degeneration that they would need to go blind first in one eye before being prescribed Lucentis, a two year treatment that is known to stabilize the condition and even sometimes reverse blindness. Patients in NHS hospitals were four times more likely to die than in a U.S. hospital and sicker patients seven times more likely. Over seven million people are on the NHS waitlist, and wait times range from eleven to twelve months for hip and knee surgery, as compared to three to four weeks in the United States.
Changing course from economics to politics, Harsanyi examines the increasing degradation of free speech in Europe. Prominent progressives, including members of the Biden administration, have advocated for curtailing America’s broad free-speech protections, as some E.U. states have already done, with deleterious consequences. In Germany, violating nebulous laws on “hate speech” can land one in prison for five years. In a Kafkaesque case, the mayor of Cologne was investigated by the police for retweeting a post that condemned the circulation of an anti-Semitic flier. In Austria and Denmark, individuals are being prosecuted for criticizing Islam. Denmark’s laws regarding speech state that “anybody who publicly mocks or insults the religious doctrine or worship of any religious community lawfully existing in this country will be punished by fine or imprisonment for up to four months.” Many find such laws particularly galling since the push for free speech in Europe originated from those who sought the right to criticize the Church. Moreover, in six E.U. states, defaming a public official is punished more severely than defaming a private citizen—the reverse of what happens in America—chilling the ability of citizens to hold their government accountable. In one case, the E.U. Court of Justice forced Facebook to remove comments critical of an Austrian Green Party politician and argued that the European Union be given the right to suppress free speech globally.
Laws limiting speech are often justified on the pretext of preventing extremists from disseminating their message. Harsanyi, the offspring of Hungarian Jews, notes that leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher were prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech, and Streicher even served two prison sentences. From 1923 to 1933, either Streicher’s newspaper was confiscated or its editors were taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. Rather than curtailing their activities, Harsanyi argues, these court appearances boosted their popularity.
Harsanyi could have strengthened his thesis in a few ways. His discussion of the decline of Christianity in Europe leaves the non-religious reader wondering why it is such a problem. This is disheartening because Harsanyi has written elsewhere that he views Judeo-Christian values as an important social glue despite his atheistic personal beliefs (which he doesn’t mention in Eurotrash). He also loosely correlates American religiosity with patriotism in a manner that ignores the maxim that correlation does not imply causation.
Likewise, Harsanyi criticizes Europe’s very lax euthanasia laws. Yet most Americans hold fairly permissive views on this issue. He also neglects to mention that most of Europe restricts abortion after fourteen weeks, unlike America prior to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Furthermore, Eurotrash would have benefited greatly from discussions of U.S. and E.U. violent crime rates and higher education systems since American leftists point to Europe’s lower violent crime rates and college tuition levels to justify the superiority of the European model.
All in all, however, these are minor quibbles for a book that provides an arsenal of arguments to defend the American experiment. Eurotrash is one of the more important books authored over the last few years. It deserves to be read widely.