Read Online The New Road to Serfdom by Daniel Hannan - Free Book Online

a much more credible proposition than they are today, when the Internet has eliminated distance, and when capital can surge around the globe at the touch of a button. It is no longer possible to ignore competition from the other side of the world. Competition from China and India is every bit as real as competition from Slovakia or Greece.
    We can see, moreover, that the size of an economy is no guarantor of its success. If big really was beautiful, China would be more prosperous than HongKong, Indonesia than Brunei, France than Monaco, the EU than Switzerland.
    In fact, the reverse is true. There is an inverse correlation between size and prosperity. The wealthiest people in the world tend to live in very small states, as can be seen in this league table.
 
STATE
INCOME PER CAPITA
(U.S. DOLLARS, 2008)
1.
Liechtenstein
145,700
2.
Qatar
124,000
3.
Luxembourg
113,100
4.
Norway
98,200
5.
Ireland
65,800
6.
Switzerland
65,000
7.
Denmark
62,500
8.
Kuwait
60,900
9.
Iceland
57,700
10.
United Arab Emirates
56,300
11.
Jersey
56,200
12.
Sweden
53,600
13.
Finland
52,200
14.
Netherlands
52,200
15.
Austria
50,600
16.
Belgium
48,700
17.
Australia
48,100
18.
United States
46,900
19.
Canada
45,500
20.
France
44,700
    Source:
CIA World Factbook
    As you will see, the list is dominated by micro-states. The only country in the top ten with a population of more than six million in Switzerland: a highly diffuse confederation.
    You might be tempted to dismiss some of these territories as tax havens, but this is to beg the question. They became tax havens in the first place by having low taxes. And why did they have low taxes? Because they were able to avoid the waste and excess that plague larger territories.
    It is enormously significant that the first large state on the list should be the United States: the big exception, in both senses. The reason the United States has done better than other macro-states is that, until now, it has governed itself like a confederation of statelets, allowing substantial autonomy to its constituent parts, and thereby retaining the chief advantages of small statehood: efficiency, lack of duplication, proximity to the electorate, limited bureaucracy.
    Euro-integrationists dimly grasp that the assumptions of the 1950s no longer pertain, and that the EU is threatened by competition from more efficient polities. But their response is not to free up their own markets. Rather, it is to seek to globalize their costs, to extend Europe’s socioeconomic model to other continents. The EU has poured resources into encouraging the development of regional blocs around the world: Mercosur, ASEAN, the Andean Community,the African, Caribbean, and Pacific Group of States. And it is investing its political capital in schemes designed to create a degree of global harmonization, such as the G20 and the Rio-Kyoto-Copenhagen process.
    In November 2009, the EU appointed its first president: the former Belgian prime minister Herman Van Rompuy. At his very first press conference, Van Rompuy announced that he wanted the EU to return to “the economic and social agenda.” Referring to the G20 Conference, he hailed 2009 as “the first year of global governance,” and went on to describe the Copenhagen Climate Summit as “another step toward the global management of our planet.”
    Until now, the main obstacle to such global governance has come from Washington. Leaders of the EU, true to their founders’ vision, have tended to favor supra-nationalism, believing that global technocracies are a surer form of government than vote-grabbing national politicians. Leaders of the United States, true likewise to
their
founders’ vision, have supported national sovereignty, democratic accountability, and the dispersal of power.
    Recently, though, things have started to change. The United States has been readier to accept a measure of supra-nationalism, and Barack Obama has indicated a willingness to share sovereignty on issues ranging from climate