Posted 3:46 PM by Floyd

Lately there have been predictions in the blogosphere of Europe's doom. Eric S. Raymond relayed Karl Zinsmeister's essay Old and in the Way, which forecast Europe's demographic implosion. Steven Den Beste has posted several recent articles criticizing Europe's insular and anti-meritocratic corporate structure, and their military irrelevance. And there have been other data points, including some frightening descriptions of high crime and police torpor in both England and France.

Last night Instapundit said:

...my attitude isn't schadenfreude, exactly. It's more like someone who realizes that an alcoholic has to hit bottom before he gets help. I've been worried about where Europe has been headed for quite a while, and so far it seems to be following the script with worrisome accuracy.

I do agree with Raymond, Den Beste, and Reynolds that Europe's policies of stifling regulations, generous welfare benefits and law enforcement lassitude will result in poor economic performance and worsening crime. Certainly I don't think that Europe is headed in the right direction. But it's too early to say that Europe will definitely hit bottom.

The reason that I say this is that America went through similar problems in the 1970's. I was rummaging through a video store on Tuesday and came across Kurt Russell's Escape from L.A. This is the sequel to Escape from New York, a 1981 movie which envisions a future New York as a giant prison camp. Twenty years ago this premise, while strained, was somewhat believable. Crime had been rising since the 1960's and for most of that period there did not seem to be any official will or capability to stop it. Many inner cities were horrifying jungles of disorder.

America had its own economic problems in the 1970's as well -- shortages, inflation, unemployment, and finally crippling interest rates.

These problems were eventually solved to some extent. Crime is nowhere near the problem it was 25 years ago, and stagflation is a distant memory. But it took a long time before voters were willing to turn the ship of state around.

Imagine that you are an external critic of America in the year 1979. Carter is president, and he is implementing the same sort of socialist economic policies that you have criticized all throughout the decade. He has even proposed a gas rationing system similar to Nixon's disastrous plan in 1973. Crime is high and shows no signs of abating. The inner cities are war zones.

Nevertheless, if you said that America was destined to hit bottom, you would be mistaken. It would seem that there was little opposition to the the disastrous policies of the 60's and 70's, and on the surface that would be true -- conservatives and free-market advocates had been routed in elections for decades. But the mistakes of the ruling order did energize discontents and lead to the Reagan Revolution.

By analogy, just because Europe does dumb things in the year 2001, and makes the same mistakes a year later, does not mean that collapse is inevitable.