A few posts back I critiqued Fox News Laura Ingraham’s comment that basically said (my paraphrase) “Europe pursues a Europe-first policy in managing their economy and so we should be be pursuing an America-First policy with our economy” (embracing Trump’s tariffs). My retort was do we really want to be like Europe, when for multiple decades they’ve had growth roughly half ours and they’ve had unemployment twice ours. I still think this is an excellent retort, however, Edward Conard of the American Enterprise Institute had an op-ed out in the WSJ before Christmas that has a much more stunning statistic in comparing Europe to the U.S. that I wanted to share with you.

While Europe has created 14 companies worth more than $10 billion in the past 50 years, with about $400 billion of market value in total, Americans have created nearly 250 such companies, worth $30 trillion (emphasis added). That success has driven up America’s middle-class incomes. The median disposable U.S. household income, according to the OECD, is now 25% greater than the median German household and 60% greater than the median household in Italy. Europeans’ incomes would be even lower if they weren’t free-riding on American innovation, defense spending and higher drug prices, which incentivize research.

These numbers are stunning–the U.S. has created 7.5 times the entrepreneurial wealth that Europe has! And that translates to higher U.S. incomes. All the more reason we don’t want to be anything like Europe economically. Europe has systematically become weaker by trying to “protect” their industries from foreign competition, and that has made them poorer. Financial markets continue to speak loud and clear–the U.S. should not become like Europe with industrial policy, rather Europe should become like the U.S. by opening up for competition. Trump administration #2, please take note.