The mirror that flatters, and the one that does not

National Review reports that a new global wealth report is being cited by left-leaning American commentators as proof that Europe has surpassed the United States in prosperity. I will not pretend to have read the report itself — the researchers have given me only the lead — so I mark what follows as inference from principle, not recollection of detail. But the shape of this dispute is one I know intimately, because I fought its ancestor in my own time.

The question is always the same: what do you count, and what do you leave out? When my critics in the 1790s insisted that agrarian simplicity was the true measure of a republic's health, I answered with a Report on the Subject of Manufactures. Wealth is not a stock of land or a pleasant distribution of median income in a snapshot year. Wealth is productive capacity — the ability of a nation's people, institutions, and capital to generate more value next year than this one. A country with a narrow Gini coefficient and a stagnant industrial base is not prosperous; it is comfortable, for now, and fragile.

Europe's social arrangements have genuine virtues — I will not be the one to deny that universal provision in health or education can enlarge the productive capacity of a people who might otherwise be excluded from it. But Europe, by inference from widely available economic commentary, has for a generation underinvested in defense, in infrastructure, in the frontier industries — semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, the commanding heights of the next economy. A wealth report that captures median household assets or leisure time may miss entirely whether the engine is being maintained.

America's ledger is not spotless. Public credit that is used as a political football — threatened with default for tactical advantage, subjected to annual brinkmanship — is public credit being slowly poisoned. I established in my First Report on Public Credit that the faith of the sovereign is not a bargaining chip; it is the foundation on which every other financial advantage is built. If America's lawmakers continue to treat the debt ceiling as a weapon, they will eventually learn what I tried to spare them: that lost credit is recovered only at great cost, and sometimes not at all.

So here is my recommendation, offered plainly: do not let a flattering or an unflattering wealth report settle the argument. Ask instead whether American policy is sustaining the conditions that produce durable advantage — sound credit, investment in the industrial base, broad construction of the commerce power to build a genuinely national market, and a check on private concentrations of financial power that escape public accountability. If those conditions hold, America's productive energy will vindicate itself. If they erode, no favorable ranking will rescue the result.