While we don’t have an H.G. Wells-level time machine, we can see the future in countries that have adopted catastrophic policies much earlier than we did. Since so many on our sociopolitical left believe the United Kingdom and Europe are more advanced than America, perhaps we should unearth that time capsule and take an anthropological and economic look at it.
The Wall Street Journal reports that in the UK, “Some seven million people — more than 10% of the population — now claim at least one or more sickness or disability benefits. The numbers are growing fastest among working-age people who should be powering the country’s economy, surging more than 60% in the past six years to 4.7 million from 2.9 million in 2019.”
Furthermore, “Not including healthcare, the country will spend more than £100 billion this year on all types of welfare benefits for the sick and disabled, about a third more than defense spending.”
Another area of interest comes via the Euro tech sector. Several sources are reporting that the EU now earns more from levying fines on U.S. tech firms than from taxing its own publicly listed internet companies.
A widely shared analysis claims that in 2024, Brussels collected about €3.8 billion in fines from Apple, Meta, Amazon, LinkedIn, X, OpenAI, and others. By contrast, all publicly listed EU internet companies combined — SAP, Adyen, Spotify, Zalando, Wise, TeamViewer, etc. — paid roughly €3.2 billion in corporate income tax. One Apple fine alone exceeded the total tax paid by Europe’s entire listed internet sector.
And of course, there is Europe’s open door, uncritical importation of the Third World, the mass of which carries with them low-IQ levels of ignorance and savagery, something Democrats — and Country Club Republicans — have overtly and covertly supported in America, depending upon which party controls the White House.
After I wondered what weaponry could be bolted on a flying car, Elon’s SpaceX Roadster demo made me think about living in a country that encourages such accomplishments. Other countries can’t seem to do much but tax productive people and businesses to pay for what former British PM Liz Truss described: “We’re becoming a welfare state with a country attached.”
Nations need to let businesses flourish, and strangling them with taxes leads only to disaster. You may have seen the X post by Brivael Le Pogam, a French citizen and entrepreneur, about the “Thirty Glorious Years” after WWII:
After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders.
Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry.
Here’s what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector.
Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times…
At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you’ve taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets.
You can read the whole thing here — and I highly recommend you do.
This socialist “transformation” has robbed the EU of its productivity. In an age of scientific progress when people are smarter than ever (we have to be to live with all the technology we use), the importation of uneducated and incapable “migrants” has drained these countries of “flying car” level productivity. Instead, that productivity is diverted into maintaining vast farms of unassimilable dolts and dotards incapable of making the jump from third- to first-world competency and behaviors for generations to come.
Le Pogam warns against choosing the path of the Democrat Party because it will produce the same outcome — builders leave or stop building, the state grows, debt compounds — without anyone explicitly voting for decline. Contrasting both the socialism of the American Democrats and France’s decline with remaining American strengths (Musk, Luckey, Bezos, Huang, and unnamed founders), he warns:
“Trust your entrepreneurs. Don’t trust your politicians. I come from your future. Don’t make it yours.”
