How did we fall so far behind the Americans?

How did we fall so far behind the Americans? By Stephen Green at PJ Media.

All that is my long-winded way of getting to our delight these last few weeks with FIFA tourists like Freddy the German — a common European fellow learning the common joys of American life far from the usual tourist destinations.

You know, like our gas stations.

Freddy loved Buc-ee’s, by the way.

And Another Thing: Not quite germane, but there’s also video of Australian tourists visiting Buc-ee’s, one of whom says, “Only America can make a gas station an attraction that everyone wants to come and see.” We build it, they come.

Then there was the whole Ranch dressing craze, which admittedly got an unfair start because a chesty Swedish OnlyFans star named Elsa decided she loved it. … Kraft responded by almost instantaneously ramping up production of TSA-sized bottles of Ranch, something only possible because the company didn’t have to first get permission from the E.U.’s Directorate-General for Condiment Packaging. Besides, the Permanent Undersecretary for Three-to-Seven Ounce Containers is on holiday this month. …

Seriously:

As awesome as Freddy is, and as weirdly attractive as Ranch dressing suddenly became, behind their touristy delights lies an uncomfortable question that our cousins will take back with them to the Old Country, provided they have the guts to ask it.

“How did we fall so far behind the Americans?”

The difference isn’t scale. The EU has 449 million people living in a single market, compared to 342 million Americans.

The difference is the explosion of wealth, abundance, and experiences that come from a regulatory climate where innovation is still (mostly) prized.

Hardly anything happens in Europe without getting permission first. That’s why Europe can’t build a social media platform like X, but Brussels can slap a record-setting $140 million fine on the firm for ignoring Europe’s censorship mandates.

Brussels and the whole “European project” smothered innovation almost out of existence in the name of unity, safety, and homogeneity — and the scale of Europe’s failure shocked even me.

Instead of teasing this out, let me show you right now the single chart that blew me away.

 

 

So a “from scratch” company is a startup, not the result of a merger, acquisition, or spinoff. Think of Apple, with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs hiring a few friends to build computers in a garage. …

What you see on the left side of that chart is an explosion of creativity and wealth perhaps unparalleled in human history, all since 1976. What you see on the right is an entire continent just limping along — a continent that used to be the wealthiest and most sophisticated on Earth, but is now blown away by our easy access to Ranch dressing. …

And I singled out tech because tech is innovation.

Want to know why Freddy can buy 57 varieties of jerky at a truck stop chain the likes of which Europe doesn’t even have a single location? That’s why, right there.

Back in April, you and I looked at Britain’s sad decline vis-à-vis the U.S. “30 years ago, Britain would have ranked fifth among U.S. states, just behind Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey,” I wrote then, but today Britain would rank 51st behind Mississippi.

But here’s the thing. When polled on where their island nation ranks among U.S. states, Britons guessed “seventh” on average. Europoors don’t know they’re poor until they’ve stepped inside an air-conditioned Costco on a steamy afternoon in Nowhere, Texas.

Europeans ought to ask themselves, “Where is our Costco? Where is our Buc-ee’s? Why does America have more and better stadiums than we do, even when they barely play Fußball? How come they have SpaceX, Apple, Facebook, and Nvidia, and we don’t?”

Simple. Europe collectivized decision-making and handed it to unelected bureaucrats. We have that problem, too, but we’re still decades behind Europe in that regard.

The thing about collectivism — or its pan-European equivalent, multinationalism — is that the collectivists always want you to believe that it’s inescapable. Here in the U.S. more than a century ago, our homegrown collectivists took old-school European collectivism and renamed it “Progressivism,” to signal that moving backwards from our founding principles was somehow progress.

Australia is more like the US, but our ruling class and our current government admire the Europeans and want to be like them — with them in charge.

On the big government versus liberty spectrum, Australia used to be up the liberty end — but now we are plummeting towards the big government end. By weird coincidence, we also have mass immigration and many new voters from the third world. Hmmm. No wonder immigration is the one special issue that the left will absolutely not discuss rationally or consider compromising on.