A European warns America

WSJ: A European warns America: Don't follow us toward greater regulation, higher taxes and centralized power. "My guess is that, if anything, Obama would verbalize his ideology using the same vocabulary that Eurocrats do. He would say he wants a fairer America, a more tolerant America, a less arrogant America, a more engaged America. When you prize away the cliché, what these phrases amount to are higher taxes, less patriotism, a bigger role for state bureaucracies, and a transfer of sovereignty to global institutions.
He is not pursuing a set of random initiatives but a program of comprehensive Europeanization: European health care, European welfare, European carbon taxes, European day care, European college education, even a European foreign policy, based on engagement with supranational technocracies, nuclear disarmament and a reluctance to deploy forces overseas"

The NYT has a column on Europe and its problems. People in some countries are just not working enough, and their lifestyle is based on borrowing.Their liberal benefits are no longer sustainable.

At Power Line John sums it up nicely:

But this particular fact was news to me:

In Sweden and Switzerland, 7 of 10 people work past 50. In France, only half do.

Past 50? That assumes that the average worker (not the average person) will work for approximately 30 years, which these days is barely more than one-third of his or her life expectancy. Whatever possessed the French, and other Europeans, to think that a person can support a lifetime's consumption with a third of a lifetime's work? Haven't the Europeans heard of the curse of Adam?
Which prompts the thought that the Europeans are post-Chrisian in this sense, too: they have tried to "liberate" themselves from the curse of Adam by substituting borrowing for working, and from the curse of Eve by not having children. It was entirely foreseeable that neither of these efforts would end well.