By David Schrieberg
Luxembourg (Photo credit: jepoirrier)
I’m an American One-Worlder Pacifist Socialist enjoying the largesse of the European Nanny State.
Perhaps I exaggerate. I think of myself more as a progressive Democrat, although the prevailing wing of the Republican Party would probably buy my first description. If Mitt Romney reads this, he'll likely agree, even if I’d like to think that as an avatar of the capitalist ethos, he’d applaud the rest of me: An entrepreneur, founder of several start-ups, a journalist-turned-small-aspiring-big businessman with an ambitious shot at growing an idea into a global enterprise.
In short, I embody the American Dream, the indomitable business spirit the Republicans believe they represent.
Fact is, it’s also the Luxembourg Dream. Nine years ago, I moved to the Grand Duchy, a tiny nation of barely 500,000 people that also happens to feature the world's second-highest GDP and sits among a handful of countries that could legitimately claim to offer the planet's best quality of life.
Yet, by pretty much any definition, when Romney and the Republicans deride European-style Socialism, they’re talking about Luxembourg, a global banking center, with nearly 150 private banks serving 385,000 “high net worth individuals,” and serving as the world’s second-ranked center of global investment funds with $2 trillion under management.
Traveling around this Rhode Island-sized, landlocked pastoral jewel, you’ll drive on excellent highways and back roads, through charming villages and towns. You’ll enjoy superb public infrastructure and note new construction throughout the country, much of it publicly-funded. While poverty, some social tensions, and imbalances in public spending certainly exist - we’re not talking Nirvana - you won’t find slums or destitution. You’ll note a high-yet-reasonably taxed population that’s 40% foreign, for the most part well integrated, and fluent in at least three and often more languages. You’ll find health care for everyone and a generous pension system under pressure like everyone else’s. There’s a government of technocrats as well as old-style politicians who suffer the usual human-nature infighting and squabbles and egos and sometimes-murky financial interests, but generally do the right thing because it works so well.
Oh, right. You also have ministries controlled by the Socialist Party and the dominant centrist Christian Social People’s Party, who govern as a coalition and would be considered Socialist-leftist by Romney & friends.
I’ve lived through enough American presidential campaigns to know the silly season induces a lot of, well, silliness. But some of it is just too much to ignore. I’m thinking specifically of the ridiculous Republican charges that President Obama is a European-style Socialist because, for example, he allegedly derides American businessmen when he says things like: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help….If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen…The point is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together….You’re not on your own. We’re in this together.”
What’s to disagree with? Yet, Romney calls the president’s contention that government investment has helped small businesses thrive “very strange and in some respects foreign to the American experience type of philosophy.” Conservatives, according to the New York Times, consider the president’s statements that government should help small business as “evidence that Mr. Obama is sympathetic to European-style social democracy.”
Let’s consider Romney’s notion of ‘foreignness’ in my case. I had an idea for a business that creates personalized information for financial professionals and their clients. I took that idea to the Luxembourg Ministry of Economy and Foreign Trade. If I could convince private investors that it’s worthy, the ministry would match their investment with a seed grant up to €100,000.
So I got the investment and the Ministry kept its promise, with minimal red tape getting there.
Next step: Build the business, get customers, and come time for the next round of investment, assuming my business plan passes its rigorous test, the Ministry will give me another matching, non-dilutive grant up to €1 million. If there’s Research & Development involved, I can apply for another grant to cover 45% of those costs. I could get still more help when I’m ready to export. And down the road, I could invite the government to take an equity stake in the company in exchange for its capital investment.
There’s a broad selection of these kinds of financing facilities provided by the Luxembourg government and the European Union for new and innovative businesses across the spectrum, but especially in the life sciences, green tech, ICT, and space technology, among others. Maybe these are free, Socialist-style government handouts, but it sure doesn’t feel that way to me. I’m working my tail off 24/7 to get there, and to earn the government’s helping hand.
Why here? Because in this land of strangeness and foreignness there’s an official drive to create an American-style culture of innovation and risk, a feeling that indeed we’re in this together. That’s not easy in a culture that’s largely risk averse, and whose national motto is “mir wolle bleiwe wat mir sinn,” Luxembourguish for “We want to stay as we are.” But this ‘European-socialist’ government recognizes that change is critical and the success of my business is good for the country, the Eurozone and the global economy.
So bravo to the Nanny State ‘foreignness’ – the European Dream - that seems to me to be very American. You could even call it very Republican.
David Schrieberg, former South America Bureau Chief of Newsweek, is the Co-Founder and CEO of VitalBriefing, a personalized financial news service in Luxembourg.
