Europas Abstieg?
Befindet sich Europa auf dem Weg zur Knechtschaft? Was würde Hayek zum Zustand des heutigen Europa sagen? Andrew Neil wagt diese Frage aus einer britischen Perspektive zu beantworten. (Link via Erzliberal)
Der Artikel ist ellenlang, deshalb hier die wichtigsten Aussagen zusammengefasst. Immer noch lang, aber die Lektüre lohnt sich.
Europas heutiger Zustand:
Hayek would consider today’s levels of European public spending, tax, red tape and state intervention to be in the red zone that is dangerous to your economic health.
The rise in the size and scope of government, Hayek would argue, is a major reason why Europe finds it so hard to compete – and even inhibits attempts at reform.
The much-vaunted and British-inspired Lisbon Agenda of 2000 – with its goal to make Europe “the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world” by 2010 – is already an irrelevant joke.
Der Aufstieg Chinas:
China has been gradually moving in a more Hayekian direction over the past two decades, after learning at incalculable cost in human lives and resources, that communism does not work.
Even just the partial embrace of Hayek has allowed China to enjoy the fastest pace of poverty reduction in its long history – perhaps in the history of the world – without any help from well-meaning western politicians and their talk of Marshall Plans for the poor, another contemporary Fatal Conceit.
Numbers in absolute poverty, defined by those living on less than $1 a day, have collapsed from 64% to 17% of the Chinese population. With annual growth averaging 8% for the next 20 years – far from an impossible rate – China will be ranked among the world’s richer middle-income countries within the next decade.
Economists tell us that, in dollar terms, the Chinese economy will overtake Germany by 2009, Japan by 2015 and the US by 2039. India’s economy, in the grip of its own Hayekian reforms, could be larger than all but the US and China within 30 years.
Europas (fehlende) Antwort:
So, despite its deep-seated problems, the US looks like being able to hold its own against China, economically as well as militarily and in culture and science. Not Europe, I’m afraid. Slowly but surely, economic and demographic pressures, combined with a stark decline in scientific and educational achievement, will condemn Europe to becoming first a military, then an economic, then an educational backwater and finally even a cultural backwater. In our lifetimes, we are witnessing the eclipse of Europe.
High social wage costs, which make it costly to hire and impossible to fire when circumstances change, have created a huge pool of unemployment. This, in turn, has raised the cost of the welfare state and produced an ever-increasing underclass, especially – but not solely – among the offspring of immigrants.
Add to that a general cultural decadence among the influential chattering classes that denigrates hard work, self-betterment, independence, success and the traditional bourgeois virtues – and you hardly have a formula for meeting the Chinese challenge.
As France’s Nicholas Sarkozy recently commented, the European social model, which the Euro-elite still thinks the envy of the world, is neither a “model” – nobody is copying it – nor very “social”, given the level of unemployment. Unemployment is at roughly a tenth of the population in France, Germany and Spain, concentrated in all three countries among the young, the unskilled and ethnic minorities and helping to trigger riots and Islamic extremism.Hayek would conclude, grimly, that the EU is in a cul-de-sac of stagnation, decline and global eclipse. Run by a political elite that eschews reform and is determined, it sometimes seems, to turn Europe into a mixture of a museum for Asian and American tourists, and a retirement home for its own aging population.
Hayek would have had the guts to say the emperor has no clothes. Hugely expensive farm subsidies are here to stay. Protectionist sentiment will remain strong, if anything get stronger. Supply-side reforms will remain elusive. Second-rate military capabilities – armies that can’t fight, weapons that don’t work – seem inevitable. These, Hayek would say, are the givens of the European firmament for the foreseeable future. Even Europe’s 10 newest members, supposedly more market-minded, have failed to shift the balance of power in any real way.
Rezepte für Grossbritannien:
Hayek would have been blunt: Britain should regain its right to set global trade and military alliances, building on its position as an international trading nation, and a financial and business crossroads to the world.
Government policy should not respond to China as such, he would say, but strive to become a low-tax, high-skill, well-educated, high-productivity vibrant nation-state just offshore of the highest-taxed, increasingly low-skilled, sclerotic set of rich nations in the world. The ability to compete with China would follow naturally.
All this, of course, would require a Hayekian cultural revolution that our political system is not yet capable of contemplating: a reorientation of British foreign policy away from Europe towards Asia and Latin America; unilateral free trade, regardless of the policy in Brussels; a radical programme to liberalise the British economy; a radical reduction in tax and public spending as a share of the economy; a flat tax to remove the poorest from tax altogether and encourage entrepreneurial flair; the injection of choice and competition into the public sector on a scale yet not contemplated; a radical programme of welfare reform, Wisconsin-style, accompanied by a transformation in policing to re-establish the rule of law in our inner cities; excellence in schools with vouchers for all, so that merit rather than money determines the quality of your education, producing a genuine meritocracy that ends the current scandalous waste of talent that blights our education system; the rescue of British universities from the dead hand of a miserly state which cannot fund them properly and the creation of a UK Ivy League.
Ein pessimistischer, wenn auch ziemlich realistischer Blick auf Europa. Die vorgeschlagenen Rezepte sind für Grossbritannien schwer umzusetzen, weil sie eine radikale Abkehr von der EU nötig machen würden.
Die Schweiz befindet sich in einer deutlich besseren Position. Sie ist in der Lage, eine eigene Währungspolitik zu betreiben. Freihandelsabkommen mit den USA und asiatischen Ländern hat der Bundesrat bereits ins Auge gefasst. Die Steuerlast ist im europäischen Vergleich noch moderat und könnte weiter verringert werden. Auch der Vorschlag einer Flat Tax ist in der Regierung aufgenommen worden. International renommierte Universitäten sind vorhanden (ETH, HSG), weitere könnten folgen. Natürlich ist das ein steiniger Weg. Die Liberalisierung des “service public” kommt nur schleppend voran, Bildungsgutscheine sind nicht in Sicht und viele dieser Reformvorhaben werden von Links- und Rechtskonservativen torpediert. Die Schweiz befindet (noch) auf einem guten Weg, wenn man sie mit dem restlichen Europa vergleicht. Doch die Zeit für Reformen drängt.
