Finally, while Europe's left may be boastfully proclaiming in Katrina's wake, "Thank God for our social solidarity," there is considerable doubt even about what "our" actually means.
The homogeneity of Europe's nation states is decreasing, with immigrants posing a growing challenge for social solidarity, while the EU as a whole faces a similar dilemma: Is a Dutchman in Amsterdam supposed to feel as much solidarity with a Greek in Athens as with a fellow Dutchman in Rotterdam?
Which brings us back to Katrina. A lot has been said and written in the wake of the disaster about how little Americans seem to care for one another. And it certainly can't be denied that it is hard to get people in New York, Maine or Utah to spend enthusiastically on levees in New Orleans -- at least until a horrific crisis occurs.
But is it really so different in Europe? Will the Dutch enthusiastically finance public infrastructure in Greece? Will Greeks fund water control projects in the Netherlands? If one takes the EU as one's term of reference, social solidarity between member states would appear to be not that different from social solidarity between US states.
No doubt, the US has very real -- and growing -- problems with the fairness of its income distribution. But Europeans should temper their criticism with the realization that Europe has similar problems of its own.
Melvyn Krauss is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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