The story often casts Germany as the responsible country, which is now expected to rescue irresponsible Greece, Spain, Italy and so forth. It is certainly true that Germany and most of the northern European countries aren’t facing the same budget crises or debt burdens that their southern counterparts are. However, that is due in part to those southern countries spending lots of money to purchase goods made in northern Europe.

Greek imports of German goods tripled after the introduction of the Euro. Same with Spanish imports. And Portuguese imports. Now that those countries can’t afford their goods, German exports are falling. German exports fell 3.6% in October. And Germany isn’t the only country feeling the pinch. Dutch exports dropped for the first time in two years, down 2% in October.

Clearly, the government of Greece and Italy and the others made poor financial decisions…and it isn’t as if Greece doesn’t have a long history of defaulting on its debts. But let’s not pretend that the budgets of northern Europe were being supported merely by the will and responsibility of its people.

“In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth.” -Xun Zi

Robert Samuelson wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post titled “The welfare state’s reckoning” in which he argues that the European crisis is really a crisis of unmanageable welfare states. I suppose that argument could be made, if you don’t count Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Switzerland as part of Europe. Also, if you ignore that South Korea, Australia, and Canada also have similar welfare states and aren’t on the verge of collapse.

Ezra Klein does a much better job articulating this point.

“If the United States had Canada’s health-care system, and Canada’s per capita health-care costs, we would have a much “larger” welfare state, but we wouldn’t have a deficit problem. Assuming we weren’t spending that money elsewhere, we wouldn’t even have a deficit.”

Shockingly enough, providing for your citizens to have access to basic health care actually lowers costs. Instead, in the US, health care is prohibitively expensive resulting in many citizens putting off obtaining medical care until they are very ill, thus making them more costly to treat. Further, young, healthy people avoid purchasing health insurance, driving up the costs for insurance companies.

It’s not rocket science, people. Even Rick Santorum gets it, accidentally.

“If you don’t have to have insurance until you’re sick, why buy insurance? … How much would insurance be if only people who needed insurance bought it? The whole point of insurance is: healthy people buy it, sick people buy it, and those who are healthy support those who are sick…. But if insurance is only sick people buy it, well guess what’s going to be the cost of insurance. That’s why there’s a preexisting-condition clause.”

Universal health care isn’t to blame for the European debt crisis. The lack of it, in part, is to blame for America’s.

“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” -Henry Louis Mencken

Quarterly GDP came out last week and it was pretty depressing. The UK grew at 0.2%, the US at 0.3%, Germany at 0.1%, and France at a whopping 0%. There was one bright spot. Belgium grew at 0.7%. Belgium is doing something right.

Not the Belgian government, though, since Belgium has no functioning government. In March, they overtook Iraq’s record for the country with the longest time without an official government. The political parties have been deadlocked and unable to create a coalition government since June 2010.

No government means no austerity packages, no tax cuts, no cuts to unemployment or Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security, no blocks against transportation funding bills. Just the government churning along, doing exactly what it was doing for the last year and a half.

John Lancaster pithily points out:

“Governments can’t all simultaneously cut spending while also continuing to grow their economies: it just defies common sense to think they can.”

The US, UK, Germany, et al. have taken the same approach to this crisis that governments in Latin America and Asia have taken when they experienced financial disorder. The results? Ten or so years of slow growth before the economy recovers.

I hear Brussels is nice.