Three sacred cows that must die so Europe can live
The decline of Europe is not inevitable, despite how much Americans love to joke/proclaim that the continent is doomed to become an open-air museum. Sure, it's possible that things have to get worse before they get better, but believing that "it's over" is just loser talk. It's never over, but the old world also won't recover by itself. So here's my pithy prescription for how Europe can find its way back to The Good Times. #1 End mass migration No single issue has cost Europe more than mass immigration when you add up the political, social, and economic consequences. You can't save the continent's declining birth rate, growing retiree burden, or even economy as a whole by importing millions of people from a culturally incompatible third world. I can forgive the original architects of this disaster with the goodwill you should always allow those who dare dream about the future. If you were nurtured on the delusion of blank-slatism, it wasn't much of a stretch to believe the theory that integration and assimilation would correct all immigration ills in a generation or two. But now that it hasn't, and the evidence is overwhelming that it won't, it's imperative that we collectively update our priors. To some of Europe's credit, this is already happening in places like Sweden, which has been on a fast track to copy many of the restrictive Danish ideas on immigration. But it's far, far from enough. Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It's also that millions who are already in Europe must go. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time on account of that realization. The Overton window is swinging wide open, but the cow is still there. #2 Drop climate austerity This year has given us yet another installment of the old air-conditioning diaries. Tens of thousands of people die needlessly in Europe every year from something as simple as summer (more than the number of Americans who are killed by guns every year!). The climate catastrophizers have somehow married themselves to the moral argument that air conditioning in itself is a sin (because it uses ENERGY!), and the death of the old and the poor is a simple sacrifice they're willing to make. It's as callous as it is retarded. But the fight over air conditioning is downstream from the larger delusion about Europe's role in climate change. Setting aside how much of global warming is due to man-made causes, the reality is that Europe is irrelevant to the equation either way. Just 6% of global emissions originate there. So even if the nirvana of net zero could be achieved, it would change nothing, yet cost the continent everything. Behind this climate hysteria is an even deeper delusion, though: that degrowth will deliver us all from the sins of modernity. That energy use in and of itself is suspect. That salvation will be delivered through abstinence. It's all nonsense. Europe can't be a competitive part of the global economy if its energy costs are several times those of its commercial counterparts. And if you combine uncompetitive industries with a naive free-trade posture toward the likes of China, you'll not only get a dirtier planet, but also a hollowed-out economic bloc. #3 Stop fighting success The best part of the American ethos is the belief that we can build our way out of anything. Behind China on chips and fabs? Let's build. Challenged by BYD? Let's build. Catch a glimpse of a future massively accelerated by AI? LET'S BUILD. Europe needs to shamelessly copy this aspect of the American ethos. It might not be able to match those crazy dreamers across the Atlantic, but it can give them a much, much better run for their money than it does today. This is the part that the European establishment already acknowledged with the Draghi report. This is what the seeds of promise from the Europe Inc initiative need to grow. But we need much more, much faster. And a big part of that is making peace with success. I know, this is perhaps the hardest ask of all. A generational skepticism of capitalism and the institutional inertia that supports it means we probably need a deeper crisis before the ship can be turned around. But Germany is on a fast track to deliver a sequel to the economic dismantling of Britain, so perhaps that example can provide the ignition. Now do it all at once This pithy prescription is not meant to be applied sequentially. First we fix this, then we fix that. No, we have to fix all of it at once: remigration, energization, and entrepreneurialism. It's all interconnected, but that actually makes the whole endeavor easier to pull off, not harder. Momentum in one area will feed momentum in the others. Europeans can rediscover their roots, their ancestry, their ingenuity, and choose to channel all those healthy national feelings toward a grand revival. But first, we need to sacrifice these holy cows and prepare the feast. How is next Thursday for you?
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