On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, David Harsanyi, a senior writer at National Review, joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss his book “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.”
“A top-down giant bureaucratic state that sucks out all the dynamism and creativity of a society where you have, you know, the one thing Americans have, I keep saying, is we’re a self-selected risk-taking population,” Harsanyi said. “We’re much more comfortable with risk and that usually manifests mostly in the business world and in the technological sector and things like that. We excel at those things.”
Harsanyi added, however, that he thinks the U.S. is “on a similar trajectory [as Europe] and we shouldn’t be.”
“I think every country has a personality, the people within it think a certain way, it’s built over generations, they have certain ideals and habits and cultural outlooks that go from generation to generation, and the American one is ‘I don’t care what you say.’ And it’s, you know, so that’s just part of the whole DNA of the country. Like the idea that we’d pay 65 percent of our salary in taxes for a welfare state, I don’t think that would fly in huge parts of this country and that’s why the European idea won’t scale,” Harsanyi concluded.
