Often when I send out e-mails or post to the blog, I like to include an excerpt of
something excellent to pique your interest. This is one of those articles that I would have to highlight the whole thing in its
entirety.
Pat Buchanan talked about this stuff years ago in Death of the West. Low birth rates (combined with abortion) have, as Steyn says, flipped the family tree upside down. Steyn says it well: "In America, the feckless, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social-democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over."
Greece is no longer a sovereign state: It’s General Motors, and the EU is Washington, and the Greek electorate is happy to play the part of the UAW — everything’s on the table except anything that would actually make a difference.
After reading this article I began to realize that the only solution is to severely cut back or eliminate entitlements to the elderly. One begins to understand how a government-run health system could quickly become a mechanism of engineered euthanasia. Since there is no will whatsoever to do anything like cutting back Social Security, a train wreck of magnificent proportions is simply inevitible. How much pain will it take before people embrace something similar to what the Third Reich did in the late 1930s? Don't say it can't happen here. Hungry people do some crazy stuff.
And for the ever-dwindling band of young Germans who make it out of the maternity ward, there’s precious little reason to stick around. Why be the last handsome blond lederhosen-clad Aryan lad working the late shift at the beer garden in order to prop up singlehandedly entire retirement homes? And that’s before the EU decides to add the Greeks to your burdens.
I'm extremely pessimistic about America's future. Instead of applying the brakes and reversing course to more responsible ideas, we seem to be asking for more power to plow further ahead into the abyss. And the crazy behavior cannot be laid solely at the Obama administration's feet, either. We were already well on our way with George W. Bush and the worthless Congress that served during his two terms in office. That's the Congress everyone wants to see back in office come November. It's like Detroit back in the day when people kept re-electing Coleman Young as mayor. At some point people simply deserve the leadership they have. Representative government is exactly that.
I'm somewhat encouraged by such things as the Tea Party movement and the growing anger of the electorate, but I think we're past a point of salvation for things economic. Change is upon us and it will not be pretty. We're simply arriving at a destination that should have been clearly understood by everyone.
R.J.
[3 pages, printer-friendly]
When Responsibility Doesn't Pay
Welfare always breeds contempt
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MzRlNGVjZjMwYjZkZjUwN2MyMTIyNWNkNDVhYjQ5NzQ=
While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement at the health-care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.
So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?
Pat Buchanan talked about this stuff years ago in Death of the West. Low birth rates (combined with abortion) have, as Steyn says, flipped the family tree upside down. Steyn says it well: "In America, the feckless, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social-democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over."
Greece is no longer a sovereign state: It’s General Motors, and the EU is Washington, and the Greek electorate is happy to play the part of the UAW — everything’s on the table except anything that would actually make a difference.
After reading this article I began to realize that the only solution is to severely cut back or eliminate entitlements to the elderly. One begins to understand how a government-run health system could quickly become a mechanism of engineered euthanasia. Since there is no will whatsoever to do anything like cutting back Social Security, a train wreck of magnificent proportions is simply inevitible. How much pain will it take before people embrace something similar to what the Third Reich did in the late 1930s? Don't say it can't happen here. Hungry people do some crazy stuff.
And for the ever-dwindling band of young Germans who make it out of the maternity ward, there’s precious little reason to stick around. Why be the last handsome blond lederhosen-clad Aryan lad working the late shift at the beer garden in order to prop up singlehandedly entire retirement homes? And that’s before the EU decides to add the Greeks to your burdens.
I'm extremely pessimistic about America's future. Instead of applying the brakes and reversing course to more responsible ideas, we seem to be asking for more power to plow further ahead into the abyss. And the crazy behavior cannot be laid solely at the Obama administration's feet, either. We were already well on our way with George W. Bush and the worthless Congress that served during his two terms in office. That's the Congress everyone wants to see back in office come November. It's like Detroit back in the day when people kept re-electing Coleman Young as mayor. At some point people simply deserve the leadership they have. Representative government is exactly that.
I'm somewhat encouraged by such things as the Tea Party movement and the growing anger of the electorate, but I think we're past a point of salvation for things economic. Change is upon us and it will not be pretty. We're simply arriving at a destination that should have been clearly understood by everyone.
R.J.
[3 pages, printer-friendly]
When Responsibility Doesn't Pay
Welfare always breeds contempt
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MzRlNGVjZjMwYjZkZjUwN2MyMTIyNWNkNDVhYjQ5NzQ=
While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement at the health-care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.
So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?