Socialist dream.

The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream By Jeremy, Rifkin Penguin, 434 pages, $25.95

Jeremy Rifkin has rendered us a service in highlighting the fact that the European Union, far from the glorified European version of NAFTA that most Americans take it for, is the boldest political experiment in the Western world since the foundation of the United States.

He is also right to point to areas in which Europe, contrary to fashionable American opinion, is clearly ahead of the U.S. Wireless technology is more advanced in Europe than here, and more smartly used. Many powerful global conglomerates today are European. And one can't help agreeing with Rifkin when he argues that there is more to well-being than just economic output; in quality of urban life, fitness of the population, availability of free time, and so forth, Europe does well.

None of this, however, justifies Rifkin's tone of rapture, bordering on puppy infatuation, toward the E.U. Permit me to psychologize: This is a love letter from an American social-democrat who is so disappointed with his irredeemably reactionary homeland that he is willing to tout a risky political experiment on another continent just to bolster his ideological points back home.

Rifkin also makes factual errors, such as claiming that Europeans "enjoy a common E.U. passport." (That is not true--they hold national passports that conform to all E.U. standard.) What's truly odd is that Rifkin praises the nuttiest aspects of the E.U.: "There are still other rights that do not exist in our U.S. Constitution. For example, the E.U. Constitution grants everyone the right of access to a free placement service." What's next in Europe, the Constitutional right to an Internet dating service?

There is a lot of hocus-pocus here that sounds like a re-hash of Rifkin's earlier book The End of Work. The traditional traded-goods market is allegedly giving way to a superior network-based commerce that changes fundamental rules of the game. "Markets, by their very nature, are an ...