Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketsWork
spfaust, I don't see Europe's socialist model as a worthy example for American government or business. Europe's unemployment rates are unacceptably high by American standards. Even April 2008's record low rate of 7.1% (in the countries using the common Euro currency) would spell turmoil here, and Europe's typical rates have actually ranged between 8% and 10% through the 1990s through 2006.
Of further concern is Europe's rapidly-shrinking native populations, and the resulting ability of smaller future generations to continue funding the high social costs being racked up by today's European socialists. In order to maintain current programs, fewer and fewer European taxpayers will have to pay higher and higher tax rates -- and I don't believe it will take very long for that to become unrealistic. Europe's apparent solution to its modern childlessness -- the mass importation of Muslim labor -- is just beginning to show onerous financial, social and cultural costs of its own.
Too much power in the hands of bureaucrats spells trouble. Bureaucracies are plodding and unresponsive by nature, and can do serious harm to others in ways that market-insulated regulators cannot even see. Markets respond because buyers and sellers are immediately responsible for their successes and failures, and their greatest risks are to themselves. I trust the markets more than any government.
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Mark Schapiro - an American investigative journalist of some twenty years' standing and the editorial director of the Center for Investigative Journalism - believes that
we can date the eclipse of the United States by the European Union quite precisely indeed - 25 June, 2004.
On that day, some 200 million Europeans went to the polls to elect their representatives to the European Parliament, consolidating the union's ascendancy. Europe's parliament leap-frogged the US Congress in size of population represented, with an additional two member states, Romania and Bulgaria, boosting the numbers still further to almost half a billion people in 2007.
Even more critically, in 2005, the GDP of the EU overtook that of the States.
"The EU is now the single largest trading partner with every continent except Australia," he writes in his recent book, Exposed, which considers the massive global economic power shift that has occurred as a result of these changes. He looks at how
companies and state governments in the US, China and the rest of the world increasingly take their legislative lead - whether willingly or dragged kicking and screaming - on issues such as environmental standards, health and safety regulation and consumer protection not from Washington, but Brussels.
The book looks particularly at the effect on American firms of EU legislation such as REACH, Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical substances - the world's strictest chemicals regulatory framework, and RoHS - the Removal of Hazardous Substances directive, as well as moves in the realms of genetically modified organisms, endocrine disruptors in plastics and Europe's embrace of the precautionary principle.
"With wealth comes trade, and from trade comes the power to write the rules of commerce," he announces.
US corporations increasingly take regulatory lead from Brussels, not Washington -
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American investigative reporter
Mark Schapiro in his book -
Exposed: The
Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power - argues that the EU has eclipsed the US with its regulatory standards. He was recently in Brussels to discuss his ideas with EU officials and company representatives. The EUobserver also managed to sit down with him to talk about the new European locus of power.
http://euobserver.com/9/26485/?rk=1
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To MarketsWork's comment regarding unemployment, it would indeed seem as if the EU has a notably higher rate of unemployment, but it only seems that way. The EU is a bit more honest in tracking their labor stats. Whereas the U.S. unemployment figures exclude those persons who have ceased looking for sustainable work, the underemployed, and those no longer eligible for unemployment benefits... the EU includes these markers in unemployment stats. Should those additional markers be included for the U.S., we would eclipse the EU by a significant margin.
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thats really impressive. 
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