America vs. Europe

There suddenly seems to be increasing interest in comparing the economies of the US and Europe. Powerline has a couple of posts to that effect, including this one discussing the laughable Jeremy Rifkin's new book about how great Europe is. (I'm going to nominate Rifkin for The Economist's ongoing contest for the wisest fool. Despite decades of being wrong about everything of note he has ever said, Rifkin remains a newsmaker and hero of the left. Go figure.) And the always-right and always-funny Mark Steyn has a column about it here.

What's usually missing in any of these discussions, though, is the military angle -- specifically, the fact that the US has one (a really, really, really big one), and the European nations don't. Okay, the UK has a passable force that has been at our right hand in all our recent forays. But France? Germany? Spain? Italy? Give me a break. My personal firearms collection puts me on par militarily with those weaklings.

Folks can tout European GDPs and standards of living all day, but until they then compensate for the fact that the good ol' US of A has been providing the defense of those whiny adolescent citizens' supposedly superior way of life since WWII, the figures themselves mean little. As we roll forward with our troop realignments over the next few years, those coddled populations are in for a big awakening. Maybe they'll even finally have to work for a living.