Victor Davis Hanson: Europe Is Warning Us

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Rome — If Americans think fuel and food prices are high, they should try Europe, where both can be nearly double those in the United States, while salaries are often lower.

Italy, like most of the now-broke southern-European countries, is desperate to privatize bloated public-owned utilities. Politicians are trying to curb pensions and encourage the private sector to hire workers and buy equipment, as a way of attracting wary northern Europeans, acting in loco parentis, to lend such perpetual adolescents more bailout money.

In theory, Italians accept that they are going to have to be a lot more like the Germans, and less like the Irish, Portuguese, and Spaniards. In reality, they may end up like the Greeks, who are still striking and occasionally rioting because too few foreigners wish to continue subsidizing their socialist paradise. Red graffiti on Italian streets still speak of socialist solidarity, while Italian politicians talk capitalism to foreign lenders.

The European Union, like the 19th-century Congress of Vienna, can point to one achievement: a general absence of war in Western Europe for more than 60 years. Otherwise, almost all the socialist promises of an equality of result are imploding before Europeans’ eyes....