To Europe, from Jack

Jack Kemp writes this open letter to Europe. Here are some highlights:

As Thatcher points out, the "new-left" elite in charge in Brussels, operating under the sobriquet of "the Third Way," has managed to persuade people "that free-enterprise capitalism needs to be tamed, qualified or restrained by state interventions to render it sympathetic. They have succeeded in this because it is still not widely understood that capitalism contains within itself the means by which society as a whole progresses. It does not need a touch of socialism on the tiller to help it along." As Havel said, the Third Way is the route to the Third World.

Leaders in Brussels continue to insist on high tax rates, expanding the welfare state, increasing government spending and income redistribution, more regulations on business, protectionism and other market interventions to limit competition. And they insist on "harmonization" among EU members to create uniformity of these anti-growth policies within a single European superstate. The result has been chronic unemployment that hovers around 8.5 percent in EUroland on average, even higher in France (9.1 percent) and Germany (9.6 percent), and depressingly higher in areas I visited in eastern Germany.