NP - Democracy & Redistribution in Europe

[David Morris]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/06/05/democracy_and_redistribution_in_europe.html

To be a little bit crude about it, since there's a lower bound on
income the median person always has an income that's below the
population mean. Consequently, democratic governance necessarily leads
to redistributive policies. This means that even though democracy is
widely supported, there are significant tensions around how
decision-making units are supposed to be defined. Few Americans are
eager to live in a democracy composed of a union between the USA and
India.

And yet from the Finnish or Dutch point of view, this is precisely the
situation the European Union has blundered into. The median Finn is
richer than the European mean, so if democracy means not Finnish
democracy but European democracy then redistribution means not that
Nokia executives pay for his health care but that he pays for a
Spanish person's health care. So there's substantial resistance to
European democracy. And yet Europe's economies have reached a level of
integration that makes it necessary to reach coordinated decisions on
budget policy, bank regulation, and other important matters. If those
decisions are made non-democratically—by the European central bank, or
by wink-nod agreements between the governments of Germany and
France—then they lack legitimacy and will perenially be composed of
inadequate half-measures. But democracy would be a real leap. The
winners of Northern Europe's welfare states would become losers. And
as we see with the politics of racial difference in the United States,
solidarity is both a powerful force and a force that tends to have its
limits. Recall that taken as a whole there's more income inequality in
the European Union than in the United States of America, even as
there's very little inequality inside Northern European countries.