As our government is trying to be more \u201cEuropean\u201d in asserting government control over the economy, Europe is going in the other direction.\u00a0 Earlier, we looked at what Germany has done to prosper economically while the United States flounders.\u00a0 Now Great Britain, in a coalition government of conservatives and moderates, is launching on a great experiment to shrink government and empower individuals.\u00a0 From The Washington Post:<\/em><\/p>\n The Obama administration might be reasserting the government\u2019s place in American life. But on this side of the Atlantic, the so-called Big Society vision of Britain\u2019s new Conservative prime minister is of a nation with minimal state interference.<\/p>\n David Cameron\u2019s 100-day-old ruling coalition is launching an effort to reduce the role of government, seeking to vest communities and individuals with fresh powers and peddling a new era of volunteerism to replace the state in running museums, parks and other public facilities. Supporters and opponents describe the campaign as the biggest assault on government here since the wave of privatizations by Conservative firebrand Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.<\/p>\n But the government\u2019s push is also about pinching pennies in an age of austerity in Britain, which, like many nations including the United States, is heavily indebted and increasingly broke. Through the toughest budget cuts in generations, the new coalition is moving quickly to shrink the size of the state, with some estimates indicating as many as 600,000 public-sector job losses \u2014 or one in 10 \u2014 by 2015. At the same time, Cameron is backing legislation that would allow communities to take over, for instance, post office branches, staffing them with volunteers instead of paid workers.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Big Society is about a huge culture change, where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighborhoods, in their workplace, don\u2019t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face,\u201d Cameron said last month in a keynote speech on the issue.<\/p>\n In what it calls a \u201cradical extension of direct democracy,\u201d the new government is moving to give citizens the right to veto property-tax increases above certain limits. In an effort to hold the public sector more accountable, it is also pressing forward with plans to have communities directly elect police commissioners while forcing the publication of more-detailed crime statistics to give residents a better picture of how local forces are doing.<\/p>\n The new coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats is set to present legislation to dissolve the government health boards that once determined needs at public hospitals, which would allow doctors to become the ultimate deciders.<\/p>\n