Is America Becoming Europe?

“Government is certainly growing in the U.S., but that hardly makes us a social democracy.” William Galston of the Brookings Institution distinguishes between social insurance and social democracy: “Americans can and do accept a role for the state in reducing the inherent insecurities of a market economy, but we do not accept the full panoply of European social democratic policies and the moral propositions that accompany them. As FDR shrewdly saw, anchoring Social Security in American individualism, by tying it to personal accounts, was the best way to assure its perpetuation.”