Passage of President Barack Obama’s health care bill has not lessened Americans’ opposition to it. According to the latest Rasmussen poll, fully 56 percent not only oppose it but also want it repealed, and only 41 percent oppose repeal. Pundits have given a multitude of reasons for American opposition: it is unconstitutional; it will be disastrous for the US economy; its re-distributive nature is contrary to American values of free enterprise and individual responsibility; its deliberately depressive effect on profits will hamper new medical research and innovation that have benefitted people worldwide; and that is only the beginning of the criticism. Conservatives frequently accuse Obama of trying to re-make the United States along the lines of European socialism through the health care bill and the rest of his domestic and foreign agenda; and polls indicate that the charge rings true among most Americans. As columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote, “Just as the Depression created the political and psychological conditions for Franklin Roosevelt’s transformation of America from laissez-faireism to the beginnings of the welfare state, the current crisis gives Obama the political space to move the still (relatively) modest American welfare state toward European-style social democracy.”
A basic assumption embedded in Obama care and the rest of that agenda is that America’s future is to become more like Europe; and that is a flawed assumption. America’s real future lies in growing closer with Asia and more distant from an aged and failing Europe. Stripped of its rhetoric, the Obama agenda is essentially Euro-centric and, dare we say it, racially biased. In 2008, I wrote that the oft-made remark by partisans on the left (including then Senator Obama) that the US had lost the world’s respect under President George W. Bush was based largely on their perceptions about European support and the same racial bias. Throughout Asia, on the other hand, our standing remained high, and people looked toward the United States for guidance and support. The accusation also failed to consider that Europe’s disdain for the United States is endemic on the continent and long pre-dated Bush and his policies. Only its expression quieted at those times when American arms and blood saved Europe from autocracy in 1918 and fascism in 1945; when American generosity rebuilt the Continent after World War II; and the when the US nuclear umbrella prevented its takeover by an aggressive Soviet Union and communist totalitarianism. (Even so, as a young man traveling through Western Europe in the 1970s, I was urged to advertise myself as a Canadian due to high levels of anti-Americanism.) As we move further from these periods when Europe’s very existence depended on the US, anti-Americanism is finding free expression there again. This is not dissimilar to European anti-Semitism retaking center stage after being muted only briefly after Europe’s Holocaust sins. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht of Germany’s Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main wrote that “Anti-Americanism in Europe is a habitus, a syndrome, an ideological Versatzstück… a cultural phenomenon” that only “hides behind a political mask.” According to Gienow-Hecht, it transcends historical periods, ideologies, and specific issues. She quotes political analyst David Kaspar who wrote, “You want to know what anti-Americanism is for most people? It’s a German schoolteacher who vacations in America, who watches American movies, who was defended from the Soviets by America and then later met an Eastern German cousin she never knew because Reagan won the Cold War, who sneers at America in front of the kids she teaches every day.”
Former British MP and Liberal leader, Lord Paddy Ashdown agrees. Five months after the 9/11 attacks, he told the BBC that they gave the transatlantic relationship “a new lease on life,” but added, “That is more likely to prove a temporary reversal of an underlying trend, to which we will revert when all this is over.” A year earlier in the prestigious journal, Foreign Affairs, C. Fred Bergstrom predicted that the US and Europe “are on the brink of a major trade and economic conflict,” already manifest in mutual trade sanctions. The conflict, however, goes beyond governmental tussles over trade, interest rates, and the extent to which the economies should be regulated. There is growing competition between US and European firms as well over large contracts. Recently, for instance, European aerospace giant EADS shed its American partner and went head to head with America’s Boeing to build an aerial refueling tanker for the United States Air Force. Complicating matters further, several US lawmakers decried the very thought of giving a European company that military contract over an American one. As markets continue to tighten in the international economy, look for European and American protectionist moves to grow.
We might also ask if Obama and his colleagues are backing the wrong horse with their agenda. When I was in India earlier this year, I noticed that my US dollar bought more Euros but fewer Rupees. The longer I was in South Asia, the more apparent it was that the region had escaped the worst ravages of the international economic crisis. There had been some job losses in the IT and export sectors, but the Indian economy and the country remained vibrant. Free enterprise is flourishing throughout South Asia, and even India’s left-center government is largely staying out of its way. Once safe strongholds of India’s communist party (CPIM) are weakening, and the CPIM is expected to be out of power by the next elections in West Bengal after ruling there for more than three decades. Indian and Asian economies are on the rise by adopting the same sort of laissez-faire capitalism that made the US an economic giant; Europe’s on the other hand are declining under the banner of socialism.
America’s founding fathers set out to build a nation premised on limited government and low taxes. While that has changed somewhat, as Krauthammer noted, it remains basic American philosophy. One indicator of that philosophy’s strength is tax revenue as a percent of gross domestic product. Money taken out of the economy in the form of taxes reduces amounts available for economic development. The greater the amount, the more control government has over how resources are distributed. While running high at 28 percent, the US remains significantly below West European countries like the United Kingdom (38), Germany (40), France (46), and the Scandinavian countries (43-50). South Asian nations, on the other hand, run from eight percent in Bangladesh to 17 percent in India. Even communist China with extensive state control is only at 17 percent. Whether in South Asia or the Far East, there is a palpable vibrancy to these Asian economies unfettered by the large government programs that characterize the European Union. They resonate with traditional American values of self-reliance and government’s small role in the economy.
The American population itself is changing, too, becoming more “Asian” and less “European.” A study by the respected Pew Research Center projects the Asian-origin population in the United States to triple by 2050. According to US government figures, five of the top ten foreign countries for legal US immigrants and naturalized US citizens since 2000 are Asian; none are European. Asians represented over 38 percent of naturalized American citizens in that period; Europeans only 13 percent. Ironically, the lion’s share of those Europeans immigrants is likely to want an American more like Asia today than Europe. Four of the five top European countries that contributed new American citizens in the past decade were formerly under communist rule. People fled those countries and Europe to escape the same big government programs that stifled freedom and initiative there and which the Obama administration is attempting, to their horror, to implement in the United States.
http://south-asiaforum.org/2010/05/06/america%E2%80%99s-future-is-with-asia-not-europe/#more-1124
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