The American conservatives depend on a fantasy of Europe to frighten American voters

Paul Krugman responded to the very misleading official Republican response to the State of the Union by Representative Paul Ryan. Ryan's image of Europe is pure fantasy. Ireland and Britain have had their recent financial crises precisely because they followed the prescription being peddled by Ryan and the American conservatives!

..in 2006-2007 Ireland was running a budget surplus, and had one of the lowest debt levels in the advanced world.

So what went wrong? The answer is: out-of-control banks; Irish banks ran wild during the good years, creating a huge property bubble. When the bubble burst, revenue collapsed, causing the deficit to surge, while public debt exploded because the government ended up taking over bank debts. And harsh spending cuts, while they have led to huge job losses, have failed to restore confidence.

The lesson of the Irish debacle, then, is very nearly the opposite of what Mr. Ryan would have us believe. It doesn’t say “cut spending now, or bad things will happen”; it says that balanced budgets won’t protect you from crisis if you don’t effectively regulate your banks — a point made in the newly released report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which concludes that “30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation” helped create our own catastrophe. Have I mentioned that Republicans are doing everything they can to undermine financial reform?

What about Britain? Well, contrary to what Mr. Ryan seemed to imply, Britain has not, in fact, suffered a debt crisis. True, David Cameron, who became prime minister last May, has made a sharp turn toward fiscal austerity. But that was a choice, not a response to market pressure.

And underlying that choice was the new British government’s adherence to the same theory offered by Republicans to justify their demand for immediate spending cuts here — the claim that slashing government spending in the face of a depressed economy will actually help growth rather than hurt it.

So how’s that theory looking? Not good. The British economy, which seemed to be recovering earlier in 2010, turned down again in the fourth quarter. Yes, weather was a factor, and, no, you shouldn’t read too much into one quarter’s numbers. But there’s certainly no sign of the surging private-sector confidence that was supposed to offset the direct effects of eliminating half-a-million government jobs. And, as a result, there’s no comfort in the British experience for Republican claims that the United States needs spending cuts in the face of mass unemployment.

Essentially Ryan's speech demonstrated that he does not know the economic status of Europe and he clearly does not understand macroeconomics.

Happiness and religion

Here is the key statement from Kevin Drum

If you live in Western Europe, there's a pretty good chance that you associate strong religiosity with death, destruction, and massive societal grief, not with church bake sales. So whatever you think of religion itself, seeing the end of religious wars, religious terrorism, and massive state-sponsored religious bigotry is almost bound to make you happy. You'd have to be almost literally crazy not to be happier in today's secular Europe than in yesterday's religious Europe.

Religion in America is just a whole different story. Sure, it's caused its share of problems, but nothing even remotely on the scale of what happened in Europe. We still have a pretty innocent view of religious belief here, and this probably accounts for part of the reason that religion is associated with happiness here but not in Europe. Whether that makes us exceptional or just naive I'll leave for others to debate.

Since I am an anglophile and history buff, I agree with the Europeans. I "associate strong religiosity with death, destruction, and massive societal grief." I have read histories of the Thirties year War, and of the religious wars in England and in Europe. Kings Charles II and Phillip of Spain are particularly interesting when viewing the religious wars of Europe. So are Kings James I, Charles I, Charles II and James II of England. All fought wars more for religiosity than for politics.

That's not an argument for or against belief in God or Christianity. It's an argument against strong religiosity and against religious control of the police, the courts and of the military capabilities of government. It is also a recognition of the social reasons for general happiness.

America came from the British tradition after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and that tradition was built into the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We took the solutions of the European religious wars as a given, and do not realize how many people died to create that social understanding.

Kevin Drum discusses the social effects of aggressive religiosity and the European welfare state, the latter being something the Europeans learned after the American Revolution. While the English separation of church and state as the solution to the religious wars is a part of our tradition, the Industrial Revolution and the Welfare State are not. In those instances, we have only our own history on the American Industrial Revolution, so the Welfare State and the other answers the Europeans have developed are not part of our American tradition. We have to work our own, American, way to solutions to the problems of the Industrial Revolution, within their Welfare State solutions, and that appears to be bringing up the problems caused by government inspired religiosity.

America has things to learn from Europe, but we ultimately will find our own solutions. My own opinion is that the separation of church and state will ultimately remain a key part of the solution, and that to remain an middle class industrial nation America will also have to adopt a version of the welfare state.

Kevin Drum presents a very interesting set of ideas, none of which go as far as I just did. Go read it.