Just as a matter of practicality, not imposing value judgments, it would be impossible for most Europeans to live in houses the size that Americans live in. Western Germany, for example, has about 80 million people and is about the size of Montana. The whole country would be urban/suburban sprawl. However, I did live in Germany and I can say for a fact that there are, nevertheless, some middle class Germans who live in large houses.
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America has a way of turning socialists into capitalists, not the other way around. The last serious socialist in American electoral politics was Henry Wallace. Wallace, who was FDR's third-term vice president, was dq'd as commerce secretary in 1946 because he was seen as too soft on communism. But Wallace was also an entrepreneur. In 1926 he had founded a seed company, Pioneer Hi-Bred. In 1999, the company was sold to DuPont, a company founded by some of America's first capitalists, for $7.7 billion. Wallace's heirs still own 15 percent of the company.
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It's difficult at this moment to see the light at the end of the tunnel. In the early 1990s, as a recession lengthened and executives took huge paychecks while firing thousands of workers, Americans began to lose faith in the capitalist system. No economist or historian stood up and said that globalization, intelligent fiscal and monetary policy and this thing called the Internet would launch the U.S. into an unprecedented era of growth, prosperity and rising asset prices.
Every mutual fund or investment product comes with the caveat that past performance is no guarantee of future performance. But when it comes to the economy at large, nearly 400 years of American history have shown that it can be a pretty good guide.
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