Russell Shorto has an excellent article in The New York Times Magazine about how he found himself living in the Netherlands and after at first rebelling against the high tax rate he learned to love the European welfare state:
In fairness to Europe’s critics, the Netherlands is one of the highest performing countries and things don’t look as great in Italy or Spain. Still, it’s a crucial point. The average standard of living enjoyed in the top European countries is better than the average standard of living in the United States and while we almost certainly can’t just copy Dutch practices, we can certainly learn from them and stop telling moronic scare stories.
I might add that one thing that tends to give a distorted picture of the situation is that the kind of Americans likely to travel to the Netherlands and other European countries are hardly socioeconomically representative. Shorto is writing from the perspective of a college educated professional, but the biggest contrast is probably found in the standard of living enjoyed by people in the bottom 25 percent of the wealth/income distribution.
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