• Tag Archives America

  • How Germans Went from Mocking America’s Decentralized Pandemic Approach to Envying It

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    “A world power embarrassing itself.”

    That’s how one prominent German magazine described the US’s decentralized, state-based approach to COVID-19 last year. The fact that the US government didn’t prescribe a national lockdown strategy, but left the decision on restrictions to the states, seemed bewildering and chaotic to many in Europe.

    One year later, the tide had turned and Germans under stay-at-home orders watched in disbelief as the US started to return to normal life with a vaccination speed four times that of Germany.

    What happened?

    Similar to the US, German law left the responsibility for imposing stay-at-home orders and other drastic restrictions in the hands of the states. Unlike in America, however, the restrictions were almost identical throughout the country. An informal, politically powerful gathering of the minister presidents of all German states together with Chancellor Merkel handed down all policies on lockdowns nationwide.

    Think of it as akin to all governors and the president meeting and deciding a uniform COVID-19 policy for all of the country. It’s federalism in name only. The international media lauded Merkel’s response, with The Washington Post praising Germany as “one of the envies of the Western world” for its handling of COVID-19.

    In the US, however, the restrictions in response to the coronavirus varied across the states. Some red states never closed down, and many like Georgia and Florida reopened early. Many blue states on the other hand, like California and New York, locked down longer and harsher.

    And that’s federalism at work: State governments assessed the situation differently, some saw less risk in reopening to their citizens than others, some may have placed freedom and self-responsibility ahead of other concerns, or the simple fact that states are just vastly different, e.g. some more rural, others more urban.

    A federal top-down one-size-fits-all approach would have neglected all of that. More importantly with state policy, unhappy citizens can always ultimately choose to vote with their feet and leave the state: For a substantial number, it was indeed the final straw to move out of certain blue-governed states like California.

    While Germany eventually reopened in the summer, it closed down again just weeks before Christmas, cutting short the usual Christmas shopping. At the same time, the US was already administering the first vaccine shots. The new phase of restrictions in Germany was meant to be only a temporary time span of four weeks but ended up lasting for almost half a year. Amid the harshest lockdown ever in Germany, with restrictions like curfews, surpassing that of even the early days of the corona outbreak, the feds pushed state governments to agree to take it to the next level: Over Easter, for five days everything including supermarkets would close. Only on one of the five days would citizens be able to buy food for half a day. The announcement backfired and under public backlash, the decision was reversed within a day.

    But days later, when some state governments began toying with the idea of “model openings,” a trial reopening of certain regions with low infection numbers, Merkel threatened a federal takeover of the corona-policy setting. More than one year into the pandemic the German parliament approved the power grab from the states and new, federally mandated stay-at-home orders ensured no state could deviate from the national strategy.

    All the while, the American vaccination campaign was full speed ahead and several US states, including Texas and Florida, had returned to normal life.

    By now, Germany’s view of the US had dramatically shifted. Gone was the earlier view of a chaotic American Corona-Wild West. Instead, many Germans began to envy the pictures of American drive-through vaccination sites and Americans returning to normalcy, unthinkable in Germany, with slow, overly bureaucratic vaccination centers and restrictions harsher than one year before.

    So what do we learn from this?

    Just because decisions are made by a central government body, it doesn’t mean they’re the right decisions. The long phase of lockdowns in Germany may now be coming to an end, but it doesn’t look like it’s fully catching up to America’s progress on reopening and vaccination any time soon. And one can be pretty confident that many Texans or Floridians are probably not too keen on switching places with a German.

    Decisions on drastic interventions in the daily life of everyday citizens are made best at the most local scale possible: ideally at the individual level, or at least at the local or state level, and not by federal officials far away contriving a one-size-fits-all plan.


    Sebastian Thormann

    Sebastian Thormann is a Young Voices Contributor and a student at the University of Passau, Germany. He has also written for the Washington Examiner, The National Interest, CapX and Townhall.com.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


    📂This entry was posted in News and Politics 📎and tagged

  • Americans Are More Charitable than “Socially Conscious” Europeans

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Americans Are More Charitable than “Socially Conscious” Europeans

    When I’m in Europe giving speeches and participating in conferences, it’s quite common that folks on the left will attempt to discredit my views by asserting that Americans are selfish and greedy.

    Since I’m generally sympathetic to Ayn Rand’s writings, I don’t see anything wrong with people striving to make themselves better off. Moreover, Adam Smith noted back in 1776 that the desire to earn more money leads other people to make our lives better. One of his most famous observations is that, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

    But, for the sake of argument, let’s accept the premise of my statist friends in Europe and simply look at whether their assertion is correct. Are Americans more selfish and greedy that their counterparts across the ocean?

    The most obvious way of testing this proposition is to compare rates and levels of voluntary charity. Selfish and greedy people presumably will cling to their money while compassionate and socially conscious people will share their blessings with others.

    So how does the United State compare to other nations? Well, I’m not a big fan of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but the bureaucrats in Paris are quite good at collecting statistics from member nations and producing apples-to-apples comparisons.

    And if you look at rates of “voluntary private social expenditure” among nations, it turns out that Americans are easily the most generous people in the developed world.

    Wow, people in the United States are so generous that their voluntary giving amounts to 10.2 percent of gross domestic product. The only other nations that even crack 5 percent of GDP are the Netherlands, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

    Most of the supposedly compassionate welfare states have dismal levels of charitable giving. Voluntary social expenditure in major European nations such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain averages less than 2 percent of GDP.

    It’s also worth noting that these numbers actually understate the charity gap between Americans and folks from other nations. Economic output in the United States is about 30 percent higher than it is in the rest of the developed world, so charitable giving by Americans actually represents a much bigger slice of a much bigger pie.

    Statists might respond by asserting that Europeans express their generosity through the public sector. I reject that comparison since – as I explained when criticizing a Michael Gerson column – it’s wrong to equate government coercion with private charity.

    But even if you have the European mindset that government should be a vehicle for redistribution, the OECD numbers show that there’s not much difference between the United States and other developed nations. According to the OECD data, government redistributes 20 percent of GDP in America compared to an average of 21.9 percent of GDP for all OECD nations. And since there’s strong evidence that government redistribution undermines progress in the fight against poverty, I actually wish there was a big gap between America and other nations!

    And don’t forget, by the way, that 20 percent of U.S. GDP is a lot more money than 21.9 percent of GDP in other nations, so government in the United States spends more on redistribution, on average, than other OECD governments. Indeed, I’ve already shared healthcare numbers making that same point.

    P.S. It’s also worth sharing the data showing that proponents of small government in the United States are far more generous than those who favor a big welfare state.

    Republished from International Liberty.


    Daniel J. Mitchell

    Daniel J. Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


    📂This entry was posted in News and Politics 📎and tagged