.as reported by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. With high unemployment benefits, almost half of Western Europe's jobless have been out of work a year or more; the U.S. figure is about 12 percent. Or take early retirement. In 2003 about 60 percent of Americans ages 55 to 64 had jobs. The comparable figures for France, Italy and Germany were 37 percent, 30 percent and 39 percent. The truth is that Europeans like early retirement, high jobless benefits and long vacations.

The trouble is that so much benevolence requires a strong economy, while the sources of all this benevolence -- high taxes, stiff regulations -- weaken the economy. With aging populations, the contradictions will only thicken. Indeed, some scholarly research suggests that high old-age benefits partly explain low birthrates. With the state paying for old age, who needs children as caregivers? High taxes may also deter young couples from assuming the added costs of children.

The apparent solution is one which the many EUropeans would seem to find flatly unacceptable:

One way to revive economic growth would be to reduce social benefits, taxes and regulations. But that would imperil Europe's "social model," which supposedly blends capitalism's efficiency and socialism's compassion.

The key word in that last sentence is "supposedly." As Samuelson is clearly aware, European and American ideas about social models are rooted in fundamentally different understandings of concepts like freedom and equality. For our cousins across the Atlantic, events like Hurricane Katrina are just the most recent and compelling examples of what they see as wrong with America, i.e. our love of freedom over social equality and our pursuit of economic efficiency at the expense of the social safety net. For them, material security is a precondition for freedom.

From this side of the pond, chronically high under- and unemployment, stagnant economic growth, the very preventable deaths of 15,000 mostly senior citizens during a heatwave, and the recent riots in the banlieus confirm that few, if any, of the EU's socio-economic models are worthy of emulation. Here, equality is equality under the law, not equality of outcome. As such, freedom and equality of outcome are viewed by us as zero sums- more of one means less of the other.

The gulf between our respective positions is not only as wide as the ocean that separates us, it's just as unbridgeable. That neither system is perfect is what keeps the critics of each forever in business. But while critics criticize, the empirical evidence is mounting and one day it must be adjudicated. One day there must and will be a reckoning. But never a reconciliation. One model is going to have to suffer an ignominious collapse. Only then will the winner openly acknowledge and reform its own shortcomings. Anyone with eyes knows which is which. Until that day arrives, expect to see more wild-eyed protests "Against Precarity" just like in the image at the top of this post. You might even expect to see more strategically-planned and executed protests whose goal, ironicaly enough, is to free us from our chainstores.

Linked to:Is it Me? and The Political Teen and California Conservative and Mensa Barbie.