Europe is angry at America for stealing the fantasy of Empire Romana

Instapundit » Blog Archive » TO EUROPE, THE US LOOKS LIKE ROME AT THE HEIGHT OF ITS POWER. Which seems fair — to conservative…

​More below.

America may look like Empire Rome at the height of power, but pretty much every ruler, and politician in Europe for the past 2,000 years has had their sights set on becoming the next Roman Empire. This is only compounded by the fact that the people under these rulers believe the same twaddle. 

How angry is Europe that America, accidentally became the heritor of this most sought after accolade? Completely. This is the big problem the French have had with the US forever. The constant carping, wheedling, and passive-aggressive behavior from the French is an attempt by the court jester to sully the reputation of the Rex. 

Americans could care less about all this flapdoodle, our Constitution says it all: "Article I, Section 9, Clause 8:

No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state."

Keep your fantasy, we never wanted it. 

" In a recent column, Margolis chats with a European tech executive about the region’s tech woes:

Europe has unicorns, such as Sweden’s Spotify, the UK’s Asos, and Germany’s Zalando and Rocket Internet. But they have not become, he says, indispensable internet platforms. They do what they do brilliantly, but none is a Google or an Amazon.

As Mr Robinson explained, in the US, the value of the three biggest listed internet companies, businesses whose creations have become platforms in their own right, is $1.3tn. In Asia, it’s $583bn, In Africa (yes, Africa) it’s $76bn. In Europe, however, our top internet companies, including Russia’s Yandex, are worth $20bn.

This means we lack the ability to compete properly in the consumer economy, he went on to say. It is like being in the industrial producer economy of the mid-20th century, he argued, without having any car companies. “We really need to fix this,” he said. “People get excited about unicorns. The problem with unicorns, however, is that the internet giants’ technology creates the unicorns. And then the giants buy them up. They eat them.”

He and a collaborator, David Galbraith, a partner in the New York investment group Anthemis, call these unicorn-munching giants “lions”, the internet businesses at the top of the food chain — the likes of Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Even the world’s unicorns, Mr Robinson added, are skewed towards the US. According to CB Insights data, there are 176 unicorns globally, of which 101 are in the US, 52 in Asia and 19 in Europe. “We need more unicorns,” he concluded, “but most of all, we need more European lions.” …

Mr Robinson was encapsulating and enumerating a situation we all know and live with daily, but often do not quite admit to — and that has long fascinated me. It is that the internet is an almost wholly US environment, and that most of the money in it flows back to the US. … such is the momentum behind the US ownership of technology that, like the Roman empire, it could be a couple of hundred years yet before it all goes wrong."

While the analysis of the existing is fine, the analysis of what is needed to correct the problem is completely and utterly wrong. To extend his 20th century auto company metaphor: this is a bit like saying Europe needs a huge fully integrated auto manufacturer to spring from whole cloth mid 20th century. No, what Europe needs is a functional economic environment which allows for the creation, and nurturing of entrepreneurial start up businesses. But Europe is modeled on the old feudal system, where the king grants license to a large business to act. There is no experience with entrepreneurial business. 

Google, Apple indeed no tech company sprung from the earth fully formed, they generally started as an idea proposed by an entrepreneur, and then made into something larger, a lion so to speak.

We tend to forget that of the lions of the mid 20th century, the top firms which comprised the S&P 500 index in 1950, only about 15% of them remain in the S&P 500. The rest are gone. The lions of today will likely follow the same course over the next 60 years with only 15-20% of them remaining in the S&P 500. 

Europe does not want a lion with 20-30 more years of life, it wants thousands of cubs all cutting their teeth attempting to become the next lion. 

Europe is dying, because it has this antiquated, neo-feudal world view (socialism is simply the template of feudalism applied and necessarily reconfigured to work within the industrial economy). That view will usher them into a quiet death, if that is what they desire, but a shift to a more dynamic entrepreneurial stance could revitalize them. 

Unfortunately, our progressives want nothing more than for America to follow the Europeans into their sleepy stuporous economic death. They are constantly lobbying for the US to follow Europe's lead, a lead which is so clearly a dead end. 

Keep your fantasy of Rome, and Empire Europe, and we shall keep ours of entrepreneurship, dynamism, and growth. Say hi to St. Peter for us.