Newseek. International edition. Not for domestic consumption:

The truth is that Americans are living in a dream world. Not only do others not share America's self-regard, they no longer aspire to emulate the country's social and economic achievements.

The loss of faith in the American Dream goes beyond this swaggering administration and its war in Iraq.

A President Kerry would have had to confront a similar disaffection, for it grows from the success of something America holds dear: the spread of democracy, free markets and international institutions—globalization, in a word.

Democracy - bad! Free markets - bad! International institutions - well, if you're talking about QUANGOs - the U.N., the World Bank, IMF and suchlike, I'm inclined to grant you that one.

But there's a certain irony when Newsweek is saying they hate us because of our freedom. About 8.5 on the Irony Richter Scale, I'd say.

Countries today have dozens of political, economic and social models to choose from.

Anti-Americanism is especially virulent in Europe and Latin America, where countries have established their own distinctive ways—none made in America.

America didn't invent democracy or free markets, though it did give them some unprecedented guarantees in its Constitution. Since the year that document was signed, France has changed its form of government - not just the ruler or leader, but the very nature of the government itself - twelve times.

The made-in-America product seems to be somewhat more reliable than what many European countries have managed, with the exception perhaps of Britain. I won't even mention Latin America.

Futurologist Jeremy Rifkin, in his recent book "The European Dream," hails an emerging European Union based on generous social welfare, cultural diversity and respect for international law—a model that's caught on quickly across the former nations of Eastern Europe and the Baltics.

In Asia, the rise of autocratic capitalism in China or Singapore is as much a "model" for development as America's scandal-ridden corporate culture.

Much in American law and society troubles the world these days. Nearly all countries reject the United States' right to bear arms as a quirky and dangerous anachronism.

They abhor the death penalty and demand broader privacy protections.

Above all, once most foreign systems reach a reasonable level of affluence, they follow the Europeans in treating the provision of adequate social welfare is a basic right.

Adequate social welfare is not a basic right. This is where the UN Declaration on Human Rights also goes off the rails. You guarantee adequate social welfare by taking money from someone and giving it to someone else. That's not a right, that's redistribution.

A right is something that someone has unless you forcibly take it away. Freedom of speech. Freedom of assembly. Freedom of religion. The right to own property. The right to bear arms. You can't give any of those to someone, because you're born with them.

Welfare payments aren't something that every human is born with; they aren't in any way a right. That doesn't mean they're wrong, or a bad idea, though poorly planned they can (and do) lead to economic disaster. They can be analysed as an investment, as insurance, as a maintenance cost, but they are not a right.

All this, says Bruce Ackerman at Yale University Law School, contributes to the growing sense that American law, once the world standard, has become "provincial."

The United States' refusal to apply the Geneva Conventions to certain terrorist suspects

to ratify global human-rights treaties such as the innocuous Convention on the Rights of the Child

Right, as I thought. Article 17, state interference in the media. Article 26, conflation of human rights and socialism. Article 27, ditto. Article 28, more of the same. Article 29, wank. Articles 43-45, interfering busybodies. Not bad compared to the Declaration on Human Rights, but ample reason not to ratify - unless you don't intend to uphold the Convention in the first place.

or to endorse the International Criminal Court

(coupled with the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo)

only reinforces the conviction that America's Constitution and legal system are out of step with the rest of the world.

The American Dream has always been chiefly economic—a dynamic ideal of free enterprise, free markets and individual opportunity based on merit and mobility.

Certainly the U.S. economy has been extraordinarily productive.

Yes, American per capita income remains among the world's highest.

Yet these days there's as much economic dynamism in the newly industrializing economies of Asia, Latin America and even eastern Europe.

First, it's a lot easier to double per-capita GDP from $1000 to $2000 than from $40,000 to $80,000.

Second, guess where a lot of the money for that economic growth is coming from? Guess who's buying all those cheap goodies from Chinese factories?

All are growing faster than the United States. At current trends, the Chinese economy will be bigger than America's by 2040.

Whether those trends will continue is not so much the question.

You are assuming that since China's economy (for example) grew by 9.1% in 2004, that it will sustain that growth rate for another 35 years. Well that's one hell of an assumption.

Better to ask whether the American way is so superior that everyone else should imitate it. And the answer to that, increasingly, is no.

Much has made, for instance, of the differences between the dynamic American model and the purportedly sluggish and overregulated "European model."

Ongoing efforts at European labor-market reform and fiscal cuts are ridiculed.

Why can't these countries be more like Britain, businessmen ask, without the high tax burden, state regulation and restrictions on management that plague Continental economies? Sooner or later, the [conventional wisdom] goes, Europeans will adopt the American model—or perish.

Yet this is a myth.

For much of the postwar period Europe and Japan enjoyed higher growth rates than America.

Airbus recently overtook Boeing in sales of commercial aircraft, and the EU recently surpassed America as China's top trading partner.

This year's ranking of the world's most competitive economies by the World Economic Forum awarded five of the top 10 slots—including No. 1 Finland—to northern European social democracies.

Lorenzo Codogno, co-head of European economics at the Bank of America, believes the British, like Europeans elsewhere, "will try their own way to achieve a proper balance."

Certainly they would never put up with the lack of social protections afforded in the American system.

Europeans are aware that their systems provide better primary education, more job security and a more generous social net.

They are willing to pay higher taxes and submit to regulation in order to bolster their quality of life.

Productivity throughout Europe, measured in per-capita GDP, is significantly lower than in America and growing more slowly. That means that no matter how you redistribute the pie, no matter where you decide is the proper balance, there's less pie to hand around.

Americans work far longer hours than Europeans do, for instance.

But they are not necessarily more productive

—nor happier

buried as they are in household debt

without the time (or money)

available to Europeans for vacation

and international travel.

George Monbiot, a British public intellectual, speaks for many when he says, "The American model has become an American nightmare rather than an American dream."

Just look at booming bri-tain.

Instead of cutting social welfare, Tony Blair's Labour government has expanded it. According to London's Centre for Policy Studies, public spending in Britain represented 43 percent of GDP in 2003, a figure closer to the Eurozone average than to the American share of 35 percent. It's still on the rise—some 10 percent annually over the past three years

—at the same time that social welfare is being reformed to deliver services more efficiently.

Because taking people's pie away and shuffling it about doesn't create any more pie.

America is about making pie.

Europe is about cutting the pie into ever-finer slices, and deciding who gets what based on an increasingly arbitrary set of rules.

The inspiration, says Giddens, comes not from America, but from social-democratic Sweden, where universal child care, education and health care have been proved to increase social mobility, opportunity and, ultimately, economic productivity.

In the United States, inequality once seemed tolerable because America was the land of equal opportunity. But this is no longer so. Two decades ago, a U.S. CEO earned 39 times the average worker; today he pulls in 1,000 times as much.

Since then, the rich have been getting richer, and the poor have been getting... richer too. The rich have been getting richer faster than the poor have, but I'm not at all convinced that that is a problem.

Cross-national studies show that America has recently become a relatively difficult country for poorer people to get ahead. Monbiot summarizes the scientific data: "In Sweden, you are three times more likely to rise out of the economic class into which you were born than you are in the U.S."

First, poverty in the U.S. is something that most countries in the world even today would not recognise as anything of the sort.

Second, Sweden has economic classes? Isn't that illegal or something.

Third, no-one ever said it should be easy to "rise out of the economic class into which you were born". It's a bit of a mouthful, anyway. What's immportant is that everyone has the opportunity, that there are no artificial barriers put in the way.

I can't take any more of this. It just goes on and on in the same noxious, factually-challenged way.

You want to know why people don't like America? I suggest that Newsweek has something to do with it.

Oh, one last quote. Unfortunately, the only appropriate response to this bit is strange choking noises:

When the soviets withdrew from Central Europe, U.S. constitutional experts rushed in. They got a polite hearing, and were sent home. Jiri Pehe, adviser to former president Vaclav Havel, recalls the Czechs' firm decision to adopt a European-style parliamentary system with strict limits on campaigning. "For Europeans, money talks too much in American democracy. It's very prone to certain kinds of corruption, or at least influence from powerful lobbies," he says. "Europeans would not want to follow that route."

(Via The Anchoress)

Update: Tuning Spork takes up the sledgehammer and gives Newsweek a few more whacks. One point he raises is interesting; he says

The truth is that Americans are living in a dream world.

It's called "the future", thank you.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:12 PM | Comments (28) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)