Demonstrators at the UK National Health Service at 70 Rally march through central London, June 30, 2018 (John Gomez/Shutterstock.com).Dethroning False Europe
[T]he future of Europe rests in renewed loyalty to our best traditions, not a spurious universalism demanding forgetfulness and self-repudiation. Europe did not begin with the Enlightenment. Our beloved home will not be fulfilled with the European Union. The real Europe is, and always will be, a community of nations at once insular, sometimes fiercely so, and yet united by a spiritual legacy that, together, we debate, develop, share—and love.
-The Paris Statement, October 7th, 2017
Europe is “reaching a dead-end,” warn the signatories of the Paris Statement. Entitled “A Europe We Can Believe In” this Statement by prominent academics and writers from across Europe (Roger Scruton, Remi Brague, Ryszard Legutko, Chantal Delsol, among others) says that Europe’s great civilizational inheritance has been dissipated and buried by ideological distortion and deception. Beyond hand-wringing, the Paris Statement evokes the manifold beauty of the European mind and spirit. The reclamation of Europe must engage its full cultural, political, and spiritual dimensions. Europe might be headed to nowhere, but the signatories provide an affirmation of Europe that should serve as a lodestar for efforts to revive its flagging fortunes.
Regulation Recessions
In his column "Robber Baron Recessions" Paul Krugman argued this Monday that American companies have been investing less because of greater market concentration in their industries. Exhibit A for Krugman is Verizon: he contends that it has not sufficiently invested in Fios, a fiber optic system that would accelerate internet speeds. He thus wants more government intervention to police monopoly power and decrease economic concentration. Both Krugman’s claim and his remedy are dubious. Let’s begin with alternate explanations for low corporate investment. The most obvious is government regulation. The Obama administration has been one of the most aggressive regulators in history.…
America’s Egalitarian Edge over Europe
World Cup 2014 competition resumes this week, with 32 teams in eight groups competing for 16 spots. Each group features four teams in a round-robin format, so every team will play three matches. The two top point-earning teams in each group will advance to the round of 16. (The Americans’ prospects for advancement appear somewhat but not altogether bleak.)
European football has always puzzled me in comparison to American sports. Europeans often pride themselves in advancing a more egalitarian society in which opportunities for success are widespread rather than concentrated. By contrast, the Americans, they argue, allow for great disparities and inequalities of income and wealth. (Some argue that the facts do not support this fulmination against income inequality, but leave that aside for purposes of this argument.)
The basic impulse of this criticism is a desire to promote equality of outcome, rather than greatness. If some at the top have to be moved down a notch or two, we may sacrifice magnificence at the top, but we will provide greater and more widespread opportunity overall.
The reason I find this puzzling is that, when applied to sports, Americans tend to prefer egalitarianism – known in sports as parity – when compared to their European counterparts. All joking about the Yankees and Lakers aside, championships are more widespread in American sports than in European football.
A Liberty Society versus a Status Society
The European Court of Justice this week declared “a right to be forgotten,” basing its decision on an EU privacy directive. Consequently, in certain circumstances, Google and other internet providers have had to delete unflattering information about people. In the European court case, a Spanish businessman did not want others to read old notices showing that he had once been delinquent in his debts.
While the scope of this decision will be debated, it did not take long for some to take advantage of it. First in line were a pedophile who wanted to expunge information about his crimes and a politician who did not want future voters to know about his embarrassing behavior. These supplicants may be foolish: the press reports are likely to remind everyone of their malefactions, even if the reports, too, can be scrubbed from the internet. But if the court’s holding stands and it not reversed in subsequent European wide legislation, the routine excise of damaging information will happen without comment, even if the information is true.
The decision is interesting on a variety of dimensions. First, it reminds us directly that the so-called right to privacy in this context is inseparable from the right of an individual to present a misleading image to the world. That a neighbor is pedophile, that a politician is a boor, or even that a businessman was once a deadbeat are all potentially important bits of information.
