4. The New Iron Curtain

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."
Winston Churchill, speech at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946

Today, July 24, 2008, Barack Obama is scheduled to make a speech in Berlin, Germany as part of his campaign to win the American Presidency. It is most fitting that the speech is to be given in Berlin where a brick wall once stood to keep people from the socialist East from seeing the progress and material success of the western market economies.

Obama will, of course, be well received, as American politicians from the Democratic Party usually are. Whether the Democratic candidate is Obama, Hillary Clinton, or John Kerry, he is the preference for Europeans, regardless of who the Republican candidate might be. Why do the Europeans show such a strong fondness for the Democratic Party and its platform over that of the Republicans? Why do they tell us that we need a Democratic administration to “heal our country’s lack of prestige” that occurred under a Republican administration?

Germany, France, and the other countries of Western Europe have adopted socialist governments by evolution and now show little real difference from the societies that once existed on east side of the Berlin Wall. Like the old communist states of the East, the governments of Western Europe have adopted cradle-to-the-grave care for their citizens at the horrendous cost of their people’s liberty. And, like their eastern predecessors, the current states of Western Europe are well on their way to economical, cultural, and demographical failure.

Regardless of geographical position, sharing productive people’s wealth with the unproductive leads to a lack of productivity, stagnation of innovation, high unemployment, and immigration of “guest workers.” Europe is dying under the weight of the same ideology that destroyed the communist states of the east; Europe is dying of a cancer where an out-of-control mass of unproductive cells feeds off the productive cells that are needed to keep it alive and healthy.

The old communist governments that once existed on the east side of the iron curtain worked hard to hide the failures of their way of life from their own citizens. The Berlin Wall prevented the immigration of the East’s brightest and most skilled. It was also intended to prevent the people of the East from traveling to and witnessing the success of market economies. Travelers to the West from Russia, Poland, and all of the other states of the East were screened and sheltered to prevent the success of the West from being told to the people of the East. As long as the people in the East thought that everyone in the world waited in long lines for a roll of toilet paper, they would remain docile and accepting of the economic plight that was their fate.

Now Western Europe needs to follow the lead of its eastern predecessors and prevent its people from seeing what a market economy can succeed at while their “share the poverty” plans continue to fail. As we learned with the fall of the Soviet empire, however, the state’s imprisoning of its own citizens is not a reliable means of long-term hiding the material success that is occurring elsewhere. Rather than inhibiting their people from traveling, it is a much more lasting solution to simply stamp out free market economies wherever they raise their embarrassingly successful heads.

A Democratic administration, particularly one that promises to raise taxes and take money out of the market place, is the best way to restrain the progress and growth that has characterized America’s economy since the beginning of the Reagan administration. The Europeans love the Democratic Party because it shares their faith in “institutionalized envy” and assures them that productive people will someday have no more place to hide – not even in the “land of opportunity.”