A Modest Proposal
for Preventing the Governments of Europe from Being a Burden to Their Citizens or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick
End the welfare overhang and eliminate VAT / endless taxes
Generate infinite energy
Sunset every commercial law and regulation
Europe is a source of vitality for the world
For European capitalism enjoyers like myself, the last 25 years or so have been a rude awakening. Europeans are becoming poorer1. European social democracies aren't the panacea we were told they were. As living standards slide compared to Switzerland, Singapore, or the US, the truth unfolds: our model of social democracy and bureaucratic statism simply doesn't work, and perhaps never did. Yet Europe isn't doomed if it rediscovers the principles that cemented its place in history as the cradle of the modern world.
Americans love to rah-rah their own civilization's achievements, while Europeans find it distasteful. But allow me to indulge. Our continent's brightest invented most of the essential elements of the modern world. From Roman legal codes to recent medical and technological innovations, Europeans are invariably at the center. Europe produced entrepreneurship, joint stock corporations, universal suffrage, emancipation from slavery, property rights and civil rights. Americans may love freedom, but Europeans invented it. In fact, technically Europeans invented America too. What defined this vital pursuit of love and life in the past, and how can we unleash it again?
The paradox of European decline
Europe's economic dominance skyrocketed with the Industrial Revolution. The real power that unleashed it was decentralized innovation. Key to its spread was entrepreneurial spirit, lack of government interference, and competition between neighboring states.
Parliament contributed to the favorable business climate by providing a stable government and passing laws that protected private property. Moreover, Britain was remarkable for the freedom it provided for private enterprise. It placed fewer restrictions on private entrepreneurs than any other European state.2
Today, the European Union and its member states are crushed by central planning that has squeezed the dynamism out of the European economy. This development seems strange as the EU's track record for deregulation and pro-business trade facilitation is clear. The Single Market has taken decades to create and is largely complete. The OECD's Product Market Regulation (PMR3) indicator measures the degree to which government policies promote or prevent competition - a higher score means a more difficult regulatory framework. Of the 5 top countries in the ranking, 4 are EU members.
However, recent bureaucratic anxiety about the Single Market has led to a regulatory frenzy. GDPR makes it difficult to launch digital businesses or compete with non-EU ones. The much-ridiculed AI Act was notable for the complete lack of businesses to regulate. In the ideological zeal to achieve the unachievable More Perfect Union, the EU regulatory machine is on productive overdrive4.

It's easy to overstate the EU's impact and breeze past the damage of member state governments that have ratcheted in size with no off-switch. Tax burdens in most EU countries now reach confiscatory levels. In France, an employer facing a €100k cost to employ will hand over less than half to the employee after taxes and social security. The average tax burden map for Europe shows a desolate picture5, where the highest earners are robbed of more than half the fruit of their labor in some cases. How is it possible that 100 can melt to 47 with so little to show for it? What incentive is there to produce in an economy like this?

The hard reality is that the social model at the center of this wealth extraction system is crumbling. Pension expenditures in aging countries like France, Italy, or Spain threaten to consume 12-15% of all GDP6 by 2070, assuming there's any Domestic Product left by then.

Universal healthcare systems, long a source of pride for Europeans, are similarly strained. Though often cited as 'free', the reality is in fact much simpler, though less infantile. Nothing is free, and universal healthcare is paid for by everyone. Basic economic reasoning leads to the obvious conclusion that subsidizing a service's price in a context of limited supply will lead to that service running out or being heavily rationed. Switzerland, by contrast, combines private insurance mandates with targeted subsidies to achieve better healthcare outcomes than France for less cost7.
Energy policy serves as a glaring example of how disconnected European elites are from the basic requirements of a functioning economy. The obsession with 'decarbonization' and 'net zero', while well-intentioned, borders on delusion and cruelty. If we were sincere about carbon reduction, nuclear power – a near-limitless and completely carbon-free energy source – would be the obvious choice. Instead, we're dragged into a Malthusian nightmare of 'degrowth'.
Energy consumption fuels life itself. Relying solely on solar panels and reducing energy use translates to supporting fewer people – a grim Chudjackian equation = billions must die. Windmill marxism doesn't just risk lives through lack of air conditioning in scorching summers. It's a slow, painful grind into oblivion as opportunities vanish and food sources evaporate into an atmosphere heated by Chinese coal plants and American natural gas. The pursuit of a green utopia, ironically, paves the way for a dystopian future where economic vitality is sacrificed on the altar of misguided environmental idealism, a self-fulfilling prophecy of decline and scarcity.

In a post-war drive to provide for all citizens after decades of strife and trouble, the European social model has followed through to its logical conclusion. Lee Kwan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, noted this as early as his late 1940s study visits to the United Kingdom in his memoirs:
What struck me most was the fairness of the system. The government was creating a society that would get everybody rich or poor, high or low or middle class on to one broad band of decent living standards. And this although there were still shortages. The rationing of food and clothes, introduced during the war, would continue until the Conservatives abolished it in the mid-1950s. It still applied to items like tea, sugar, sweets, chocolate, butter, meat, bacon and eggs. Utility clothes at reason-able prices were available, but needed coupons.
I was too young, too idealistic to realise that the cost to the government would be heavy; worse, that under such an egalitarian system each individual would be more interested in what he could get out of the common pool than in striving to do better for himself, which had been the driving force for progress throughout human evolution. That realisation had to wait until the 1960s, when I was in charge of the government of a tiny Singapore much poorer than Britain, and was confronted with the need to generate revenue and create wealth before I could even think, let alone talk, of redistributing it8.
Mortgaging the future is a false solution
To mask these troubles, national governments have turned almost universally to deficit spending. Deficit spending mortgages future growth to pay for present consumption. Sometimes this reaches absurd Kafkian parody, such as Spain's socialist regime subsidizing 18-year-olds with €400 worth of videogames and books on their voting-age birthday.

Most often, it's simply to feed the ever-ratcheting pyramid scheme of increasing state liabilities to retiring citizens or provide healthcare in overburdened hospitals. It's unfair to its beneficiaries, who subscribed to a social contract where they traded work for retirement security, only to find that the checks bounce or the benefits buy fewer groceries than imagined. It's patently obvious that the confidence game can't continue indefinitely with an ever-shrinking, childless, overtaxed working population feeding a growing aging population and a gargantuan state administrative machine.

Recent announcements from the European Commission only seem to reinforce the direction towards greater state intervention in the economy, a fundamentally aimless pursuit. Fittingly, the EC's 2025 Competitiveness Compass of central planning has a compass pointing to every cardinal direction at once. Tellingly, no private sector representatives were present at the announcement word salad to 'decarbonize competitively'.

Pedro Sanchez, Spain's electoral runner-up Prime Minister at the head of a fragile minority government, took time out from being pursued by endless corruption scandals to address the World Economic Forum earlier this year [YT]. He gaslit attendees into thinking Spain's recent spate of deficit-fueled growth was a product of the State's performance, rather than a mortgage on the future of Spain's young workers. To the few people who had the patience to watch the drone show, the contrast with Javier Milei's fiery defense of individual liberty could not have been starker [YT].
The EU-wide omniparty of placid center-left or center-right, often in tenuous alliance with extremist left-wing political cells, only has one song on their playlist: We just need One More Omnibus Law to create a Capital Markets Union, a Banking Union, a Potato Union. Higher income taxes, new exit taxes, a Green New Deal for Competitive Green Energy that will Green accelerate poverty in the Green continent to unimaginable Green levels. A glitch in the LSD trip from Brussels to Strasbourg has made the record skip the same beat over and over again for different things, stuck in the manic paralysis of a machine whose only incentive is to keep doing more of the same.
I find it extremely unlikely that any of the current coterie of political leaders would all of a sudden U-turn and ratchet down the size of the government after decades benefiting from nice offices. Donald Tusk had a chance to do something about the regulation he decries during his decades of public service. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission head, didn't even have to be elected into the position she's held since 2019 and has been in some form of national European government since at least 2005.
It is not fit that you should sit here any longer. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing lately … In the name of God go.
–Oliver Cromwell
These are not solutions nor do they come from people that are fit for Europe, no matter how often the same talking heads repeat it over and over again, in a frenzied sort of European Juche. Europe does not need more windmill marxism. They are false solutions that change nothing.
Radical Decentralization
It's easy to be an armchair policy maker but I am going to do it anyway, because typing is free and there do not seem to have been substantive efforts to tackle the really hard issues yet.
Unlike many anti-EU chuds who reply guy on every post from an EU politician, I don't believe in dismantling the EU. In a multipolar geopolitical context, European confederation strikes me as the only political structure that can offer safety and stability for European citizens. But there's more than one way to skin a cat.
Europe’s salvation lies not in rejecting federalism but reimagining it. A “loose federation” of autonomous states—competing on taxes, embracing nuclear energy, and sunsetting bureaucracy—can restore prosperity. The alternative is a spiral of decline, where well-meaning regulations suffocate the very innovation Europe once pioneered. As Switzerland proves: small government, not big bureaucracy, is the true social model.
To close out, I offer A Modest Proposal: for Preventing the Governments of Europe from Being a Burden to Their Citizens or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (in three parts)
1. End the welfare overhang and eliminate VAT / endless taxes
The most pressing urgency is to shrink the size of the state and free the Europeans. On average in the EU, government expenditures chew up around 50% of GDP, with some critical situations such as France edging around 60%. The social model is broken and needs hard choices. However, as Switzerland once again shows, low-tax regimes can still provide perfectly good public services. This conundrum is confounding to statist accelerationists who would have people pay over half their livelihood for potholed roads and 6mo hospital waiting lists.
2. Generate infinite energy
Never listen to Net Zero people again, consign decarbonization to the compost bin where it belongs and eliminate competitiveness-destroying carbon taxes9. Europe is absolutely riddled with shale reserves. There is a breakeven point for extracting all of it, we just choose to sabotage our own prosperity so that we can allow Chinese manufacturing to outcompete our hard industries. Build nuclear power plants in every city. We need to be energy maxxing.

3. Sunset every commercial law and regulation
National and EU laws need referendum kill-switches, and new regulations should have an automatic expiration date unless explicitly renewed. Most importantly, the stifling tall poppy syndrome of OECD tax rate harmonization and endless uniformization needs to stop. The way vitality can come pouring back into the Old World is if its people are allowed to thrive and compete, including at the policy level. Dynamic competition between EU member states but also between national regions as policy labs is a key ingredient to the decentralization that undergirded Europe's competitiveness during the Industrial Revolution.
The Road Ahead
If this seems like a dramatic sea change, it's because it is. The further complicated matter is that the EU is not one entity but 27 individual national polities, each with their own set of anxieties and concerns. The US may have 50 states to make things complicated, but now imagine 27 sovereign countries with at least 1 language each, if not more. Some of these languages are even Hungarian.
But the Argentine case is the beacon of light that should guide us. Argentina miraculously climbed out of the hole of socialism out of sheer desperation, as many socialist regimes wind up doing to their citizens. Unwinding the debt on the future will involve a sharp shock of short-term pain. But as the Argentine experiment also shows, it's always darkest before the dawn.
Europe led the world before. With the right priorities, unconventional ideas and new people to execute it, it can do it again.
VLLC
Western Civilization, Jackson Spielvogel (11th Ed.)
The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, Lee Kuan Yew