Russell Shorto, a regular contributing writer for the New York Times
Sunday magazine, offered a country-to-country comparison between the
United States and Holland, where he's been living for the last 18
months. The story's headline is self-explanatory: "Going Dutch - How I
Learned To Love The European Welfare State." It was the most popular
article on nytimes.com for a while, perhaps because it hit the sweet
spot among the Times liberal readership, fusing sophisticated
travelogue with Euro-socialist aspirations.
[This item, by Clay Waters, was posted Wednesday on the MRC's TimesWatch site: www.timeswatch.org [1] ]
An excerpt:
Picture
me, if you will, as I settle at my desk to begin my workday, and feel
free to use a Vermeer image as your template. The pale-yellow light
that gives Dutch paintings their special glow suffuses the room. The
interior is simple, with high walls and beams across the ceiling. The
view through the windows of the 17th-century house in which I have my
apartment is of similarly gabled buildings lining the other side of one
of Amsterdam's oldest canals. Only instead of a plump maid or a raffish
soldier at the center of the canvas, you should substitute a
sleep-rumpled writer squinting at a laptop.
For 18
months now I've been playing the part of the American in Holland,
alternately settling into or bristling against the European way of
life. Many of the features of that life are enriching. History echoes
from every edifice as you move through your day. The bicycle is not a
means of recreation but a genuine form of transportation. A nearby
movie house sells not popcorn but demitasses of espresso and glasses of
Dutch gin from behind a wood-paneled bar, which somehow makes you feel
sane and adult and enfolded in civilization.
SUSPEND Excerpt
Shorto brought up some free-market arguments, if only to dismiss them:
For the
first few months I was haunted by a number: 52. It reverberated in my
head; I felt myself a prisoner trying to escape its bars. For it
represents the rate at which the income I earn, as a writer and as the
director of an institute, is to be taxed. To be plain: more than half
of my modest haul, I learned on arrival, was to be swallowed by the
Dutch welfare state. Nothing in my time here has made me feel so much
like an American as my reaction to this number. I am politically left
of center in most ways, but from the time 52 entered my brain, I felt a
chorus of voices rise up within my soul, none of which I knew I had
internalized, each a ghostly simulacrum of a right-wing, supply-side
icon: Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Rush Limbaugh. The grim words this
chorus chanted in defense of my hard-earned income I recognized as
copied from Charlton Heston's N.R.A. rallying cry about prying his gun
from his cold, dead hands.
And yet
as the months rolled along, I found the defiant anger softening by
intervals, thanks to a succession of little events and awarenesses. One
came not long ago. Logging into my bank account, I noted with fleeting
but pleasant confusion the arrival of two mysterious payments of 316
euros (about $410) each. The remarks line said "accommodation
schoolbooks." My confusion was not total. On looking at the payor -
the Sociale Verzekeringsbank, or Social Insurance Bank - I nodded with
sage if partial understanding. Our paths had crossed several times
before. I have two daughters, you see. Every quarter, the SVB quietly
drops $665 into my account with the one-word explanation kinderbijslag,
or child benefit.
SUSPEND Excerpt
After admitting that "you don't have to be a Fox News commentator to
sneer at what, in the midst of a global financial crisis, seems like
Socialism Gone Wild," Shorto went on to defend it:
But
there's more to it. First, as in the United States, income tax in the
Netherlands is a bendy concept: with a good accountant, you can rack up
deductions and exploit loopholes. And while the top income-tax rate in
the United States is 35 percent, the numbers are a bit misleading.
Shorto most cherishes the Dutch health-care system:
The Dutch
are free-marketers, but they also have a keen sense of fairness. As
Hoogervorst noted, "The average Dutch person finds it completely
unacceptable that people with more money would get better health care."
The solution to balancing these opposing tendencies was to have one
guaranteed base level of coverage in the new health scheme, to which
people can add supplemental coverage that they pay extra for. Each
insurance company offers its own packages of supplements.
He belatedly took on the downside of this benign socialist paradise:
O.K.,
Enough euphoria. It's true that I have grown to appreciate many aspects
of this system. But honesty compels me to reveal another side. There is
a mood that settles into me here, deepening by degrees until its
deepness has become darkness. It happens typically on a Sunday
afternoon. I'll be strolling through a neighborhood on the outskirts of
Amsterdam, or cycling in a nearby small town, and the calm, bland
streets and succession of broad windows giving views onto identical
interiors will awaken in my mind a line from Camus's "Myth of Sisyphus"
that struck me to the core when I first read it as an undergraduate: "A
man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot
hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he
is alive."
Shorto even admitted that "one downside of a collectivist society" "is
that people tend to become slaves to consensus and conformity and are
not encouraged "to stand out or excel." But Shorto concluded his
positive look at socialist Holland by passing the mike to a local
author to claim his country is actually freer than the United States:
Geert
Mak, the Dutch author, insisted that happiness is tied directly to the
social system. We were sitting at his favorite cafe, a hangout of Dutch
journalists since the end of World War II, and the genial, old-wood
setting of the place, as well as its location, around the corner from
the Dam and the center of the city's history, added a bit of luster to
his words and reminded me, for the thousandth time, why I'm still here,
despite the downside. "One problem with the American system," he said,
"is that if you lose your job and are without an income, that's not
just bad for you but for the economy. Our system has more security. And
I think it makes our quality of life better. My American friends say
they live in the best country in the world, and in a lot of ways they
are right. But they always have to worry: ‘What happens to my family
if I have a heart attack? What happens when I turn 65 or 70?' America
is the land of the free. But I think we are freer."
END of Excerpts
For the May 3 piece in full: www.nytimes.com [2]