Free The New Road to Serfdom by Daniel Hannan Page B

their activity once the recovery has started.
    Third, the debt incurred by supposed contingency measures can take decades to pay off, as notionally emergency policies become a permanent drain on the treasury.
    Fourth, there is a tendency for governments to expand at times of crisis, not in order to meet the crisis, but in order to allow politicians to demonstrate that they are “doing everything in their power.”
    Fifth, such expansion is most damaging and most permanent when it is carried out at a time of one-party dominance.
    Sixth, whatever the economic consequences of state expansion, there are always deleterious democratic consequences, as the advantages of decentralization are lost. Citizens find that the decisions that impact most tangibly upon them are often taken, not by locally elected officials, but by the appointed directors of large bureaucracies.
    I’m sure you can see where this argument is going. The financial crisis of 2008 also prompted governments around the world to react by extending their powers—nowhere more so than in the United States and the United Kingdom. The leaders of those countries, doubtless from the best of motives, believed that governments could ward off recessions by spending more, borrowing more, owning more, and regulating more.
    The trouble is that the pursuit of these policies has left their peoples poorer and less free. The story of the Roosevelt years should stand as a warning to Americans of the extent to which one administration can fundamentally alter the relationship between state and citizen, trampling over the founders’ vision and making permanent and harmful changes to the republic. Let’s hope that this generation doesn’t need to be taught that lesson again.

5
DON’T COPY EUROPE
    To the size of a state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for they can none of them retain their natural facility when they are too large.
    —ARISTOTLE
     
    A merican journalists are forever trying to get me to be disobliging about President Obama. It’s not something I want to do, for several reasons.
    First, etiquette. The chap is your head of state, the supreme representative and exemplar of a great nation. There’s a decorum about these things.
    Second, diplomacy. Politicians shouldn’t be critical of foreign leaders without very good reason.
    Third, democracy. Barack Obama won a handsome electoral mandate, and many good, generous, patriotic Americans—Americans such as my cousins in Philadelphia, of whom I’m tremendously fond—voted for him.
    Fourth, decency. He seems a likeable fellow, with a wonderful family to whom he is plainly devoted.
    Fifth, benefit of the doubt. I don’t believe for a moment that any U.S. president would deliberately set out to impoverish his country, or to undermine its essential freedoms. If these outcomes should ensue, they are likely to be the unintended consequences of well-intentioned reforms.
    The sixth consideration, however, towers over the first five. No friend of the United States wants an American president to fail. The security and prosperity of the world are underpinned by the strength of the United States.
    Friendship carries obligations. When you see a friend about to repeat your mistakes, you try to warn him. Let me, then, offer this chapter in a spirit of amity. I have been a Member of the European Parliament for eleven years. I am living in your future. Let me tell you a few things about it.
    DON’T EUROPEANIZE THE ECONOMY
    __________
    President Obama, not unreasonably, wants to reconcile America to Europe. Indeed, he didn’t wait to be elected before setting to work. During the 2008 campaign, he promised a crowd of giddy Berliners that he would reaffirm America’s support for multilateralism, for European integration, and for concerted action against global warming.
    Immediately after assuming office, he toured European capitals to repeat these themes. “America has been arrogant,” he told