Utopias always fail. It’s a mercy when they collapse quickly, since it minimizes their damage. Had the U.S. not flooded Bolshevik Russia with food aid arranged by the well-meaning Herbert Hoover, that regime might have collapsed in the early 1920s, saving the lives, down the road, of tens of millions of peasants, dissidents and other victims of Stalin — as Hoover would later admit.

The fantasy land that is the European Union, and its play money called the Euro, will not last 70 years. In fact, it might not last the next 7 — with Greece on the verge of economic collapse under the weight of misguided socialist policies fed by crony capitalist loans.

How wasteful it was for German banks, steered by their government, to pour billions of dollars into a tiny and antiquated economy, in a country governed by beggar-thy-neighbor socialism. Culturally, Greece is the mother of our reason and our freedoms. Economically, it’s a western extension of Turkey, one which has never recovered from centuries of Ottoman plunder.

However, the German bankers never worried whether they would be repaid, serenely sure that their government would reimburse them or use its clout to collect the debt. If this sounds eerily similar to how “affordable housing” slogans and government guarantees inflated the mortgage bubble in America, that’s no accident — as Stream editor Jay Richards unpacks in his book Infiltrated.

German elites are the drivers flogging the EU project, which they have seen from the beginning as a squeaky-clean means to achieve the national dream of two centuries — a German-dominated continent, ruled from Berlin — via the velvet glove of Brussels. Making some bad loans for boondoggle projects in Aegean backwater towns was a small price to pay. A larger price was giving up the Deutschmark, the sound currency that finally banished the Teutonic national nightmare of mass inflation. But Germans are always willing to shoulder sacrifices in pursuit of national greatness, as a good friend of mine likes to say (his grandfather died with von Paulus in Stalingrad).

House of Cards

But why pick on the Germans? The entire EU project is founded on economic nonsense and political wishful thinking: the premise that more than a dozen democracies with vastly divergent work habits and cultures could share a single currency and a single interest rate, without either snapping the spines of their national governments or tearing the union to pieces.

Before the Euro, a nation whose economy was slowing down could boost itself by lowering its interest rates or expanding its money supply (thus devaluing its currency). Chained together by the Euro, Europe’s nations now chafe beneath a single fiscal policy — while setting their budgets and spending on their own. So instead of debasing their currency, politicians buy votes by increasing government spending.

The only way such a system can work is if the would-be hegemon, Germany, is willing and able to underwrite every mistake its neighbors make (like Greece letting government workers retire with fat pensions at age 61) in return for gradually tying their hands and stealing their sovereignty piecemeal. Greece has taken the gold, but now wants to cut the strings. I hope that it does. The aftermath will be ugly in the short term, but the Euro’s house of cards would crash sooner rather than later.

Other People’s Children

But Europe’s broader delusion won’t be dispelled any time soon: The idea that you can personalize the benefits of spending, while socializing the costs. In plain talk, this means “buying things for yourself with other people’s money.” That’s what the Greeks were doing to the Germans, but the rot goes deeper than that: The way that Europe’s (and America’s) entitlement system is designed, the present generation intends to retire in spending comfort with excellent health care at the expense of the next generation.

Now, in fecund societies this system could work: You raised your children, and they tended you in your decline. If you had no children, you lived on your savings or begged for charity. The entitlement system, which now pervades the West says, that we as a society raise and support everybody’s else’s children, and then they will care for us when we get old. There’s a problem there. You pay the cost, personally in time and tears, of bearing and raising children; but you get no additional economic benefit from that when you retire. The selfish or pessimistic people who refused to have any kids get the same retirement package you do.

So the smart play economically is going childless, and — surprise — in godless, pessimistic Europe — this group is becoming the dominant one. So who will be alive, working and paying the taxes needed to fund all these government-funded retirement plans in a few decades when today’s hedonists are creaky and wrinkled? Not many people at all, as it turns out. Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s children.

David Goldman runs the numbers and draws the dismal conclusions in his brilliant book, How Civilizations Die and Why Islam Is Dying Too, pointing out inconvenient facts like the birthrate in Hungary: 0.8 kids per woman. Replacement fertility is around 2.3, so you do the math, which isn’t a whole lot better in any Western country except for Israel. (His theological explanation for this is fascinating — and I’ll cover it in an interview with the author next week.) Soon the ratio of workers to retirees in Europe will plummet from 2:1 to 1:1. I met Goldman recently at Acton University, where he spoke on the collapse of Europe’s demographic pyramid scheme. I asked him at lecture’s end if he saw any alternative future in Europe that wouldn’t involve mass euthanasia. He smiled wryly and said, “War. Europeans are good at that.”