Your Teacher Said What?! (16 page)

But those are movies aimed at adults. Exhibit A for the defense is one of Blake and Scott's favorites: Tim Burton's 2005 version of the Roald Dahl classic
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

As the movie opens, Charlie Bucket is living in the most over-the-top poverty ever seen on-screen. His father is employed, if you can call it that, screwing the caps on toothpaste tubes by hand. His four grandparents spend their entire days in a single bed, complaining. Cabbage soup is all the family can afford to eat—and after Charlie's dad loses his job to a machine, not even that.

So when, against all odds, Charlie wins a trip to the legendary Wonka chocolate factory, viewers will be forgiven if they expect the film to blame the enormously successful Willie Wonka for their troubles. But the movie does anything but. The movie's star, Johnny Depp as the chocolate tycoon Willie Wonka, is practically an encyclopedia of neurotic tics—can't bear to be touched, can't even say the word “parent”—but it's not too much to call him heroic. No Ayn Rand character better exemplifies the virtues of free-market capitalism. Wonka is the world's greatest chocolatier because he is more creative—ice cream that won't melt, a single candy that satisfies for an entire day—and harder working than his competitors. He is even more ruthless, though in a thoroughly honest way.

Most movie factories, ever since Charlie Chaplin's
Modern Times
, have been spirit-crushing places. In fact, this has been true ever since Charles Dickens, whose factories' machines are explicitly monstrous. Not Wonka's. His factory is an amusement park, with machines that may not be entirely safe—Charlie's companions on his trip discover that they bite—but are nothing if not fun. They are the perfect reflection of their creator's genius, and there is no point at which his success is shown as anything but well deserved.

And Charlie's dad, who lost his job at the toothpaste factory? Far from resenting the loss of the job he described as “hours long; pay terrible,” by the end of the movie he has taken on a job repairing the machines that replaced him. “Things,” we are told, “had never been better for the Bucket family.” Nor had they ever been better for the filmmakers. Despite the lack of cheap shots at free markets,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
was one of the biggest-grossing movies of the year; in inflation-adjusted dollars, it's still one of the hundred most successful movies of all time.

Which just reminds me that I still don't understand the reflexive hostility of the entertainment business to free markets and capitalism. Maybe the best explanation is that the writers, directors, and actors who produce our filmed entertainment are allowed (maybe even encouraged) to retain a child's view of the world. Like ten-year-olds, they retain a belief in obvious heroes and villains, in perfection as a place where things don't change (especially as the result of human action), and in happy endings.

Once again, just like Progressives.

 

Ever since the 1880s, May 1 has been celebrated—if that's the word—as International Workers' Day. May Day (which I know has nothing to do with the distress signal, though maybe it should) has been uniting the workers of the world ever since the 1886 Haymarket Riot, a labor protest in which eight Chicago policemen were killed, and it has been a pretty rambunctious anniversary ever since, from the 1919 May Day riot in Cleveland, which ended with two dead and forty injured, to the Los Angeles “melee” of 2007 (twenty-nine marchers and a dozen police officers injured). In fact, the only places you can be sure that a riot
won't
occur on May Day are the few remaining traditional communist countries, where any temptation to get frisky in support of the proletarian cause is chilled out by battalions of tanks on parade.

Even so, Greece was, by May 2010, an extreme case. The simmering anger in Greece over the austerity measures needed to reform what was, at the time, the world's most fragile economy, had boiled over. After a year of protests against (among other things) the privatization of state-owned companies, changes in the law to make it easier to both hire and fire employees, and a decrease in government spending, the Greeks had had enough.

Two weeks earlier, a big chunk of America had also had enough and had been taking to the streets with protests of their own. And though those Tax Day protests were uniformly peaceful, the level of anger in Washington DC's Freedom Plaza on April 15 didn't look any different from what was going on in the streets of Athens.

There was, however, one pretty obvious difference between the two. The Tea Party protesters in the United States were demonstrating in
favor
of exactly the same things that the Greeks were
against
. The signs on view at the American demonstrations were demanding
more
austerity and
less
government. It's hard to imagine a bigger contrast between what we might call the European “street” and the American.

Now, I confess to a soft spot for the Tea Party activists. In fact, I sometimes feel the kind of proprietary feelings about the movement shared by people who saw the Beatles in Hamburg in 1962—or maybe more to the point, who were in the audience for Ronald Reagan's “A Time for Choosing” speech in support of Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. You know, members of the there-at-thebeginning club. That's because on Thursday, February 19, 2009, I was in my usual spot at the anchor desk for
Squawk Box
while our manic reporter, Rick Santelli, was doing a live feed from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The economic news was, even by the standards of 2009, crappy. The TARP bailout had been passed some months earlier. The Obama administration, evidently embarrassed that the Bush White House had become the biggest spendthrifts in American history (“overspending is what
we
do”), had passed the $800 billion stimulus bill a few weeks earlier, and the previous day, the president had announced his “Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan.”

Santelli is not the quietest guy in the room at the calmest of times, but this morning I thought his head might explode. As he turned away from the camera to ask the floor traders which of them wanted to pay for their neighbor's mortgage, I told him, “They're putty in your hands.” I was being sarcastic, but Rick evidently regarded it as a challenge and replied, “We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July.”

The most distinctively American protest movement of the last century had been born. And by “distinctively American” I mean “distinct from Europe.”

Now, don't start assuming that the Kernens are a bunch of unsophisticated rubes who, if they travel outside the United States at all, behave obnoxiously, speak English loudly and slowly to the locals, and in general behave like the prototypical “ugly Americans.”
²²
We love Europe. We had a great family vacation in 2008 in Portugal. We'll be going to Europe again and again as Blake and Scott get older.

But it's one thing to enjoy Paris or Lisbon or Rome as a vacation spot and a whole different thing to want to import European ideas into the American economy. It's easy to make fun of the Tea Party activists when they accuse the current administration of wanting to turn the United States into France, but it seems to me that they're on to something: A big part of the Democratic Party's agenda seems awfully comfortable with the European way of doing things and awfully
un
comfortable defending the American way.

 

“Blake, have you ever heard the phrase “ ‘the American way' ”?

“I think so.”

“In school.”

“Not really so much.”

 

Blake's teachers are uncomfortable even
describing
the American way, much less defending it. I'm guessing this is because there's so much negativity in the air about the subject, whether it's about exporting American ideals to other countries or even the idea that the American way of doing things might actually be superior. After members of the news media spent eight years criticizing George W. Bush for ignoring European leaders, they fell all over themselves to praise Barack Obama for cozying up with them. Europe, we are constantly told—or we
were
, before the Eurozone started having to spend hundreds of billions to support its weakest members—has figured out how to have a prosperous society that has practically vanquished inequality and where health care and education are not only better but cheaper. To a lot of these people, Ronald Reagan's belief in America as a “shining city on a hill” has become a punch line.

Not, however, in the Kernen household. I'm not so sure that the world is divided into America and Everyone Else, but I do believe that there
are
two different ways of seeing the economic world, and one of them is definitely more popular in the United States.

Actually, this idea is pretty widely held, both by people (like the Kernens) who think the American way is superior and by the trainloads of Progressives, liberals, and—of course—Europeans who think the American way is barbaric. Any time I find myself in agreement with so many people, it's a good idea to check my assumptions. Are America and Europe really all that different?

While I was checking those assumptions a few months ago, I came across a book by Peter Baldwin, a historian at UCLA, entitled
The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike
. As he points out, the measurable differences between modern Europe and present-day America are actually pretty small, smaller, in fact, than the differences between Spain and Germany or Iowa and California. A few of his observations:

Some of these points are just handy to have around when some Frenchman or Swede looks down his nose at our unsophisticated ways, such as when they sneer about our dependence on cars for transportation as opposed to the better-for-the-environment-andmorally-superior high-speed trains used to travel across Europe. (It turns out that America transports ten times the amount of freight by rail that Europe does, which means that French families may get to the supermarket by train, but the stuff they buy there was transported all the way across country by trucks).

A lot of these similarities, though—and the better-known differences, such as the European “advantage” in education and health care—hide something pretty dramatic: The European economies have spent the last five decades benefiting from a giant free ride paid for by American taxpayers and consumers.

Start with defense. The U.S. Department of Defense spends three times as much as all of Europe, and what we're buying with all that money—$630 billion a year—doesn't just defend America. Ever since World War II, the United States has been responsible for the peace and freedom of Europe as well, and when three hundred million Americans are paying for the security of four hundred million Europeans, it frees up a huge amount of money for Europe to spend in other places: like welfare, or “free” health care.

Europe gets a free (or at least discounted) ride on health care as well. It's true that the United States spends more on health care than a typical European country without getting much better results—this was one of the arguments made on behalf of Obamacare. But one of the biggest reasons that health care is so expensive in the United States is the cost of drugs, which is a direct consequence of the fact that the United States is the only large economy where patent drugs are priced by the free market; in Europe and everywhere else, prices are controlled, or profits, or both. Thus, while the average American family actually takes fewer prescription drugs—only about three-quarters of the number taken in Europe—it spends nearly 40 percent more for the privilege. The United States is, literally, subsidizing the consumption of drugs all over the world—drugs that would never exist without a U.S. market that is willing and able to pay the roughly $800 million it takes to research and design a new drug.

The same thing is true of America's colleges and universities, where the basic research on so many of those drugs—and a lot of everything else needed by a technological society—originates. The professors I worked under at the MIT Center for Cancer Research in the late 1970s were the beneficiaries of a U.S. system that—precisely because it is partially private—spends nearly three times as much per capita on postsecondary education as any country in Europe and creates research and knowledge from which the whole world benefits.

 

“Blake, do you know what welfare is?”

“That's when you can't work.”

“Right. Do you know who pays people who can't work?”

“I don't know; the government? Generous people?”

 

Somewhere along the way, it became standard editorial-page “truth” that America was a harsh place—one that might be wealthy but was stingy when it came to taking care of the poor. But the idea that the United States is less generous on social welfare turns out to be, well, ungenerous. Though Sweden (to pick what looks like a
really
generous European welfare system) spends 37 percent of its annual GDP on welfare, while the United States kicks in only a tightfisted 17 percent, these numbers are based on
gross
payments. Since the United States, unlike Sweden, typically collects no—or very little—tax on its payments, a calculation of
net
payments reduces the Swedish percentage of GDP to 29 percent, while the U.S. number rises to 19 percent. And it doesn't stop there: Since the United States is a whole lot more productive than Sweden, the right way to compare the numbers isn't as a percentage of the total economy but as a percentage of the population. After that little calculation, the differences almost disappear: Sweden spends $6,300 a year per capita (in 1990 U.S. dollars) while the United States spends $5,400—more, for example, than France, Germany, or Denmark.