RUTHFULLY YOURS

This little book is a cri de coeur — an outburst of rage and sorrow in equal parts. The language of “Ill Fares the Land” is felicitous and polished, as befits such an intelligent and erudite author. But unless the reader belongs to the choir to which Tony Judt preaches — call it the Europhile liberal left, who would rather sell their Prius than forgo their New York Review of Books — he or she may ask: Where have we heard this before? A pugnacious reader might stab a felt pen at every other paragraph and scribble: “Caricature!” or “What about . . . ?”

Cries of the heart like Judt’s have been common since Jeremiah and the lesser prophets. This time it is not, as according to Amos, the “virgin of Israel” who “is fallen” because of pride and sinfulness. It is the United States and Britain that have succumbed to the worst of the West: capitalism, greed, egotism — to the false gods Reagan, Thatcher and Milton Friedman. The wages of sin are the loss of community, trust, equality and social justice. And the true god, according to Judt, a transplanted Briton, is European-style social democracy à la Scandinavia.

Ever since the Republic was born, Europeans like Talleyrand, Hegel and Heine have loved to finger the United States as the perverted child of the Enlightenment — while millions of others bolted for the new Promised Land. In 1797, the French thinker Joseph de Maistre found ugly “symptoms of weakness and decay.” Europeans will nod enthusiastically when reading Judt’s mantra: “broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid.” But as I write this, I read the daily diatribes in the local papers about Hamburg’s pothole plague. And I wonder about bridge failures in such properly run countries as Germany, Finland and Switzerland.

Like the prophets, Judt likes to resort to homily: “We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.” He also approvingly quotes Tocqueville, who laments that people fear “every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble.” But after delivering his broadsides against “market radicals” from Mandeville to Hayek, Judt offers a very old idea: the “virtue of collective action for the collective good.”

To get there, Judt has to shoot a goodly number of straw men. Not even manic market radicals believe, as Judt avers, that private interest will produce enough public goods — like public education or an interstate highway system. Who in the United States (except on the fringes of thought) insists that “any one person could be completely ‘self-made’?” Certainly not Europe’s favorite Beelzebub, George W. Bush, who pushed No Child Left Behind and a prescription drug program for the elderly. What is the land-grant university of the 19th century, what is Head Start, what is federal tuition assistance, what is affirmative action, if not testimony to the belief that the state must level the playing field?

Judt doesn’t hawk socialism, since he rightly recognizes that it requires “perfect knowledge (of present and future alike) that is never vouchsafed to ordinary mortals.” But then he goes overboard: “The same is true for market theorists: they don’t know everything,” and so “they don’t really know anything.” Who ever touted their omniscience? What these theorists correctly assert is that the market is the best information system known to man: it has millions broadcasting in real time what is offered and what is wanted at what price. This is why capitalism learns from its crises, whereas the Soviet Union just accumulated them until it collapsed.

Remember Sweden in the 1990s, until then the emblem of democratic socialism, where the state grabbed more than one-half of G.D.P.? It pumped up a real-estate bubble in the late 1980s, which burst in the early 1990s, driving G.D.P. down by 5 percent and unemployment up to 12 percent. In 1994, the budget deficit soared to 13 percent. This was not America in 2008, but a statist country that fits Judt’s dream to a T.

“Private wealth and public squalor” — the famous line by John Kenneth Galbraith is also Judt’s. Guess what: United States government spending at all levels was over 40 percent of G.D.P. last year, which puts it in the neighborhood of such nice bastions of social justice as Norway (41 percent) and Germany (45 percent). Does income inequality cause crime and a host of other pathologies? Judt seeks to prove the point by extracting causation from correlations, a no-no even in his own historian’s profession. Crime has plummeted since the early 1990s, while income inequality has risen. As Goldman Sachs shoveled bonuses by the billions, crime kept falling in New York City, as well as nationwide; this has been true even in the current recession. This is not to exculpate Wall Street, but to caution against drawing too much proof from too little evidence.

But enough of the fact-slinging. The central problem with “Ill Fares the Land” is a classic fallacy of the liberal-left intelligentsia, more in Europe than in the United States. Call it the “Doctor State Syndrome.” The individual is greedy, misguided or blind. The state is the Hegelian embodiment of the right and the good that floats above the fray. But the state does not. It is a party to the conflict over “who gets what, when and how,” to recall Harold Lasswell’s definition of politics. It makes its own pitch for power; it creates privileges, franchises and clienteles. This is why it is so hard to rein in, let alone cut back. The modern welfare state creates a new vested interest with each new entitlement. It corrupts as it does good.

It also invites corruption of itself because the more the state distributes and regulates, the more it tempts its citizens to outflank the market and manipulate public power for private gain. The founding fathers grasped this hard truth, and hence they hemmed in government. Even the most moderate of social democrats tend to ignore this insight, and so does Tony Judt.

The all-providing state does not expand trust, as Judt claims; it renders trust moot and so, weakens society because it promises to protect its members from their own mistakes. Such a false sense of security explains why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac must share the blame with Lehman and Goldman Sachs. Iceland’s and Germany’s state banks were hardly more circumspect.

Sometimes, as in 2008, markets are not self-correcting, which is why government must step in. But let’s hope it will pull out again; officials are not wiser or nobler because they come with a government title. They need to be checked and balanced, just like General Motors, Google and Goldman. This is why America has lived with the same constitution since 1787. And why the country’s vitality has always overwhelmed its pathologies, as, throughout its history, it has opened itself up to myriad newcomers of all creeds and origins. Judt, the immigrant, should know. He has done better in America in terms of access and fame than an American of the same caliber would have done in Sweden or Germany. It is still easier to escape from the slums of America than from the banlieues of France.