7 ways Europe is more Conservative than the U.S.
Note: The views expressed in this article are my views alone and not the views of my employer or anyone else
We tend to think of Europe as more Liberal and “Socialist” than America. In many it is but in many ways it isn’t. Here are a few:
1. Unlicensed Physicians — Liberals love to talk about how we should copy Europe’s single payer health care system [1]. There’s a lot of merit to that but Liberals often don’t talk about is how Europeans use physician assistants to fill their medical needs [2]. Physician Assistants and Nurse Practioners are used in America but they are much more limited and they are not allowed to diagnose patients and prescribe medicine. This means that Europe is able to fill less expensive procedures with less expensive doctors and more expensive procedures with more expensive ones. Consider also that Europe has much more foreign trained physicians as it allows for foreign doctors who were also trained abroad and not just educated abroad [3]. Compare this to America where they can be educated abroad but they still need to complete residency in this country to practice.
2. Drug Approval Process — The drug approval process on average in Europe is around 12 months, in the U.S. its 18 [4]. Drugs take far longer to get approved in the U.S. This is partly due to the decentralized approval process Europe has vs. the centralized one America has. They also don’t require the full clinical trials for some low risk drugs before going on the market whereas in in America they do [5]. The Europeans recognized 2 things that conservatives have said for quite a while on drugs:
· Drug prices are partially high partly because they have to recover all of those years that they are not on the market.
· Drug companies don’t want to put bad drugs on the market simply by market forces rather than government regulation.
3. Tort Reform — The U.S. is arguably the most litigious country in the world [6], we sue people for literally everything. Some of this has merit but a lot of it is unnecessary and it clogs up the legal system. In America, if you sue someone frivolously and it turns out that you’re wrong, there is no consequence, there is no penalty on your part. The defendant would have to countersue you for damages. This is a terrible system as there is no penalty for abuse of other people’s time and resources. In Europe, however this is not the case, they have adopted a conservative idea of “Loser pay” which means that the loser of the case has to pay the other persons legal fees plus interest. According to the Manhattan Institute, this has led a dramatic reduction in the number of frivolous lawsuits in Europe; less than half of American tort suits [7].
4. Infrastructure Funding — Europe uses something called an Infrastructure Bank which leverages private capital to fund large scale infrastructure projects such as bridges, airports, etc. [8]. The private companies are obviously not doing it for free, they charge fees and tolls to cover their capital cost. Compare this to the U.S. where most infrastructure projects are funded by government money and for which you can’t contract out the work, it has to be done local union labor [9][10]. Europe has basically adopted a conservative, free market idea of privatizing infrastructure, whereas “free market” America builds infrastructure in a socialist way.
5. Corporate Taxes — Up until the tax reform bill passed by congress [11], the U.S. had the highest statutory tax rate in the world of 35% [12] and still has the longest and most complicated tax code of anywhere in the world with more than 70,000 pages [13] and according to the tax foundation, one of the worst tax systems in the world [14]. Compare this to Europe where most of them have a rate well below 35% and Ireland has it at 13% [12]. They have a territorial tax system which means that they don’t double tax European companies profits that are made overseas [15] and their tax code is a fraction of the length of ours. The UK is complaining that its tax code is more than 10,000 pages while ours is more than 70,000 [16].
6. Apprenticeships — Conservatives have always said that not everyone is meant to go to college [17]. They’ve always said that their needs to be alternatives for people who want training beyond high school but don’t need a full-fledged degree. European countries, particularly Germany actually do this [18]. They are well known for their apprenticeships and alternatives to 4-year college degrees [19]. Liberals in America for the most still latch on to the idea of college with their push for free college tuition by Bernie Sanders [20].
7. Cutting waste in college campuses — Conservatives have always argued that college campuses are wasteful and driving up tuition as a result of that [21]. European college campuses are actually quite bare bones. They don’t have the concept of dorms as much and the students tend to live off campuses [22]. They also tend to be located in more central areas and don’t have the same “home away from home” feeling [23].
Some European countries like Sweden, Denmark, U.K. and others actually rank higher than the U.S. on the conservative Heritage Foundations Index of Economic Freedom [24]. The index measures a country’s overall freedom in tax, regulatory, legal and other policies. The U.S. has dropped significantly in recent years falling below Georgia. This does not mean Europe is more conservative than the U.S. There are still many things the U.S. does well on labor mobility, entrepreneurship, marginal tax rates, etc. that make it more of a free market economy. This is just simply to shine a light on a preconceived notion.
Sources:
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484637/
3. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=68336
4. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.375.519&rep=rep1&type=pdf
6. https://www.clements.com/resources/articles/The-Most-Litigious-Countries-in-the-World
7. https://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/cjr_11.pdf
8. http://www.eib.org/projects/priorities/infrastructure/index.htm
9. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-31/the-u-s-has-forgotten-how-to-do-infrastructure
10. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-infrastructure-costs-so-much
11. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/text
12. https://taxfoundation.org/corporate-income-tax-rates-around-the-world-2017/
13. https://taxfoundation.org/how-many-words-are-tax-code/
14. https://taxfoundation.org/us-has-third-worst-tax-code-developed-world/
15. https://taxfoundation.org/global-perspective-territorial-taxation/
20. https://www.sanders.senate.gov/download/collegeforallsummary/?inline=file
22. http://college.usatoday.com/2015/08/27/europe-vs-united-states-college-experience/
23. https://enrollment.rochester.edu/blog/college-in-the-us-vs-europe/
