The Logical Dead End of the Nanny State (Excellent)

Via Western Rifle Shooters Association

VERBATIM POST

The Silicon Graybeard
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Quote of the Day from Mark Steyn in today's Orange County Register:

This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the "abolition of want" to be accomplished by "co-operation between the State and the individual." In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life's vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: "Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity."

In Steyn's unique style of wit and sarcasm, and having witnessed much of it personally, he speaks the truth no one else dares to:

...one-fifth of children are raised in homes in which no adult works – in which the weekday ritual of rising, dressing and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. One-tenth of the adult population has done not a day's work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997. (emphasis added)

The European Nanny State is collapsing in front of TV news cameras every day. There are really only two possible outcomes that I can see: either the governments collapse into bankruptcy and currency destruction, or the EU turns into a giant command economy: communism, fascism or National Socialism (Nazism). Years ago, I remember quipping "who would have thought world communism would collapse because there's no money in it?", but it's true. A command economy can never out compete a free market economy, even one like ours which had been hobbled by a century of socialist policies. If the EU becomes a command economy, it just kicks the collapse can down the road and makes it worse. Janet Daley, writing in the Telegraph last week said,

The truly fundamental question that is at the heart of the disaster toward which we are racing is being debated only in America: is it possible for a free market economy to support a democratic socialist society?

As both Steyn and Daley emphasize, and we can clearly see, the idea that a capitalist economy can support an ever-expanding socialist welfare state is collapsing in flames right in front of us. It's not the poor vs. the rich. It's bored kids who have never earned any self-esteem by accomplishing anything (precisely because of the welfare state) going "wilding" and burning and stealing because they're bored. How else do you explain the millionaire's daughter breaking down stores to add to her (presumably) already stuffed closets? Or the "stunning 22 year old model", and the others who give the lie to the story that it's poor people getting revenge.

Back to Steyn,

The London rioters are the children of dependency, the progeny of Big Government: they have been marinated in "stimulus" their entire lives.

There is literally nothing you can't get Her Majesty's Government to pay for. From page 205 of my book: "A man of 21 with learning disabilities has been granted taxpayers' money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute."

Hey, why not? "He's planning to do more than just have his end away," explained his social worker. "Refusing to offer him this service would be a violation of his human rights."

If taxpayers funding a man's flight to Holland to employ a prostitute (is this one of those jobs that British women just won't do?) isn't enough; Ann Coulter contributes this:

A year earlier, in 2007, another product of the new order, Fiona MacKeown, took seven of her eight children (by five different fathers) and her then-boyfriend, on a drug-fueled, six-month vacation to the Indian island of Goa. The trip was paid for -- like everything else in her life -- with government benefits.

(When was the last time you had a free, six-month vacation? I'm drawing a blank, too.)

This is one of those cases where you need a Ph.D. in economics to be stupid enough to fall for the idea that everything can be paid for by a productive class and will be forever. "From each according to his abilities to each according to his need" always, always, falls apart at that "need" part, when need turns from a meal to a flight to Amsterdam for a prostitute or to India for six months vacation. From bread to circuses. At some point, the system falls apart. The productive class sees the life that parasites lead, sees progressively less and less of their efforts, the sweat of their brow, being "allowed" to stay in their wallets, and they quit. Then the whole society collapses.

Starting now.

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome." - Robert A. Heinlein