Americans! Don’t Copy Europe!

Let me introduce the unintroduced to Daniel Hannan from the Telegraph UK:

Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the EU is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free. He is the winner of the Bastiat Award for online journalism.

Mr Hannan’s book The New Road to Serfdom warns America not to fall into the traps and potholes that have derailed the European Economy and nearly bankrupted the Nations of the West.  He’s offering us some advice and his book  is a letter from a pilgrim whose nation is further down the road we are traveling.  He’s reached Vanity Fair and it isn’t looking good for Faithful.

If there are any Americans reading, I’ve got some bad news for you. I inhabit your future. As a Member of the European Parliament, I have spent eleven years working in precisely the kind of system that you seem intent on creating. Believe me, my friends, you won’t like it. As the greatest of all Englishmen puts it:

Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,
Lest child, child’s children, cry against you woe!

I’m not saying that everything in the US is good and everything in the EU is bad, far from it. It’s just that the aspects of Euro-politics which your rulers seem most intent on copying are those which have demonstrably failed: the centralisation of power, higher state spending, welfare dependency, excessive regulation.

Article continued at TUK.