Would America stop innovating if we had European-style welfare?

Imagine universal free healthcare, free education, free childcare and a universal basic income

Image courtesy: Wander-Lush

I grew up in Europe. This shaped a lot of my thinking, and it’s why I’m unlikely ever to become a Republican. First in Italy, until age 11, then in England until after university, then I lived in France, then Switzerland, before immigrating to the US. In Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, when the leading tabloid newspaper was Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun, I formed my deep seated disrespect for an element of blue collar culture: the crab pot mentality, where people who have abandoned their dreams will discourage yours. They’ll go to some trouble to help you drop your big ideas of becoming somebody. I also learned that conservatism helps you abandon your dreams in a subtle, insidious way: it tells you to know your place, and tells you about the scarcity of our resources, and it gives you a silver lining in the form of a myth that anyone can make it big if they work hard enough and never give up. I disliked Rupert Murdoch even more than Margaret Thatcher.

America was always attractive to this Kenyan-born Irish kid. It seemed to have no class system, something that was stifling and suffocating in England. America produced a staggering number of millionaires and…