Big Government, Grande Miseria
From the desk of Napoleon Linardatos on Fri, 2008-02-15 10:08
The New York Times has a slide show A Life less Dolce, “in a funk, Italy sings an aria of disappointment.” It’s a splendid visualization of the declining welfare state model. Along with the pictures we learn that:
* The Italians are the least happy people in Western Europe
* The mayor of Rome says that Italy is "a country that has lost a little of its will for the future. There is more fear than hope."
* 11% of Italian families are under the poverty line
* 15% of Italian families have trouble meeting their monthly expenses
* 70% of Italians between the ages of 20 and 30 live with their parents
The startling feature of the European welfare state is its total dependency in a vibrant private sector and healthy demographics on the one hand, and on the other its cultivation of an enervated citizenry resigned in the idea of a government which provides a free ride to whichever desire.
The Italian and other European societies have trapped themselves in this fatal contradiction and the only way out of it is a massive ideological challenge to the dominant left-wing orthodoxy. By the way, take a look at what European students are taught in school about free markets.
Welfare State
Submitted by Armor on Fri, 2008-02-15 20:22.
Linardatos: " The startling feature of the European welfare state is its total dependency in a vibrant private sector and healthy demographics on the one hand, and on the other its cultivation of an enervated citizenry resigned in the idea of a government which provides a free ride to whichever desire. "
Does it mean that the welfare state both depends on healthy society and destroys healthy society? Maybe it is true. But the absolute disaster comes when the European welfare state is put to the service of mass immigration from the third-world.
1Cent: " The rest of old Europe will go the same route "
And the USA too. The leftist disease is doing damage on both sides of the Atlantic.
The rest of old Europe will go the same route.........
Submitted by onecent on Fri, 2008-02-15 18:46.
....they also suffer from the same malignant lack of values and refusal to change. Decades of socialism have morphed Europeans into risk adverse narcissistic nihilists. It's no wonder they can't organize a response to their being colonized by Islam.
It's sickening to think of all American lives lost in freeing Europe in WWII only to see them trash their culture and freedom now.