Election 2012: If Your Friends All Jumped Off a Cliff, Would You Do It, Too?

We've all heard that argument from our parents, to illustrate the absurdity of doing something just because everyone else is. That warning is pretty much what the next Presidential election is about, according to WSJ's Bret Stephens. Do we follow the Europeans off the cliff or turn around?

The truth is that what began in Greece (and the U.S. financial crisis before it) simply put a match to already very dry tinder. Uncompromising labor unions have spent decades driving European jobs and industry overseas. Confiscatory tax rates have given every incentive to tax evasion, capital flight and the emigration of the fittest. Work-force rules have diminished productivity and discouraged hiring. National budgets have been strained to breaking by delusional pension promises and the mounting cost of everything a welfare state supposedly offers free, like health and education.

Worst of all, the European model has generated a self-reinforcing combination of prejudice and interest that is almost impossible to break. A cultural bias against "savage Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism" limits the political options for structural economic reform; routine labor strikes, politically entrenched civil services (38% of Belgians work for the state, doing Lord knows what), and other beneficiaries of public largess eliminate all remaining hope. Europe's crisis is not just fiscal and monetary. It's also a crisis of vision and character.

The vision of Obama is to move us further in the direction of Europe, even as some of those countries, the ones that still can, are beginning to turn away. The slow growth and high unemployment that we've experienced in the last year or so, that's about as good as it gets with the European model - these are the good times. And the catastrophe that awaits is very real and inevitable.

We have the benefit of watching Europe drive off the cliff and splat at the bottom of the canyon, but some of us apparently want to follow them down. We should heed our parents' warnings.