Johnson on the US and Europe

Japan’s a nursing home, Europe’s a museum, and China’s a jail. --Larry Summers

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Around 420 million years ago, life was predominantly aquatic. It was then that the ancestors of the modern sharks first appeared. So they're older than trees.

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Zelenskyy said 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and 370,000 wounded. That compares with 600,000 dead and wounded reported in Russia.

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So Assad is gone. And apparently, no U.S. intel agency had a clue. Reminiscent of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Biden's offer to Zelenskyy of sanctuary. Not a clue.

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Johnson on the US and Europe

Boris Johnson recently published an editorial in, of all places, The Daily Mail, discussing the relationship between the economies and the cultures of America and Europe. Here are some of his points.

In the year 2000, the average worker was 8 percent more productive even than the average German worker,

Today the gap is widening, and the average German worker – swaddled with EU laws on workers’ rights – is now 16 percent less productive. As for Britain, the story is even worse. They started the century 18 percent behind. They are now 27 percent behind the Americans.

The US taxpayer provides about 60 percent of the defense budget of the entire 32-strong Nato alliance. To understand the scale of the US commitment, in hardware, NATO currently has about 5,000 fighter and ground attack aircraft – of which about 4,000 come from the US, with the 31 other countries of NATO supplying the rest.

Great Britain plans to push defense spending up to 2.5 percent of GDP; yet most other countries are barely on 2 percent, while the US is spending 3 percent of a vastly greater GDP.

Europe will have to learn from America because there is plainly a link between the culture of freedom – the constitutionally protected freedom of speech and thought – and the American culture of innovation. There is a link between American risk and reward, tax cuts and growth, and deregulation and dynamism.

Why should Americans work all the hours God gives, and take a week’s holiday a year (as many Americans do) to pay for the defense of Europeans who can’t even be bothered to go into the office?

Johnson writes, "We need to reacquire some of the incredible energy and can-do spirit propelling their economy. We may not want their healthcare system or their gun laws. But we would be mad to sneer at the US economic model when it is such a storming success. Above all, we can’t sneer at the American economic model and simultaneously sponge off America."