I was going to write about the French riots, the British spending cuts and layoffs, and the German budget but Monty at Ace’s did it better than anything I can come up with:
This is our future
This is our future if we don’t change our ways.
Exhibit A: England faces the largest budget cuts since World War II.
Exhibit B: France is tearing itself apart over a move to bring state pensions under control.
This is the end result of the welfare-state. The Europeans (and Democrats here at home) want a utopia where all needs are met, all the hungry are fed, all the children warm and safe, all the sick made whole, all the evil punished and the innocent made free, a land where all is peace and all live in harmony. Instead, the welfare-state is waste and weakness and impoverishment and upheaval and ennui. It is generational warfare, class warfare, enormous debts, squalor, meanness, shortages, selfishness. It is, at base, the end of civil society. Communist economies fall faster because they take the poison pure; it takes the merely socialist ones more time to sicken and die.
Go read the whole thing.
