Is Liberalism waiting to explode and tear this country apart?  Looking to Europe, it appears that might be the end result of the welfare-state.   France has riots over the apparently small move to change the retirement age (and thus the age you can draw a state pension) by a mere two years.  The Greeks rioted earlier this year because of government budget cuts to address their huge deficit problem.  Will we be facing the same sort of chaos here?

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, and 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; (Russia in just 70 years) it takes longer for the merely socialist ones to sicken and die.

In England, much of the country not only relies on handouts (count the National Health System as part of that), but remembers nothing else. Entire generations of citizens have been born and grew to adulthood in a land of a debased civil society; a country with "free" healthcare, a generous welfare system where it was often more remunerative not to work, and a private sector so sclerotic and union-infested that a structural unemployment rate of 8-10% was accepted as perfectly normal. (Hmm...10% as the "new normal"...where have I heard that before?)

Why is Germany doing so much better in relative terms than England and France? Germany had to re-assert the traditional work-ethic after World War II out of absolute necessity: everything had been destroyed! The re-integration of East Germany in the 1990's forced them to be even more efficient, more productive, more financially conservative. England and France, by contrast, went the route of social welfare; the more "liberal" route.  Unless we get back to our traditional work ethic, personal responsibility, and entrepreneurial freedoms, we may be following them.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in the third quarter of 2008 approximately 45 percent of U.S. residents lived in households in which at least one individual received government benefits.  These numbers are increasing year-to-year.  These benefits came from programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.We are nearing the point where nearly half, of the population depends on government largesse for a substantial part of their income. This is not money they earned themselves, not wages or savings, but is instead money taken from the more productive half of the country. Half of our citizens pay no income taxes at all. An increasing number will draw public-sector pensions, Social Security, food stamps, housing stipends, and medical insurance (Medicare/Medicaid) in amounts that far exceed what they ever contributed. Nearly half of the US population, in short, lives not by the fruits of their own labor but by the civilized theft from others, as filtered and distilled through the hand of the government. The mathematics of the problem trump philosophical issues of fairness, of governance, of ethics, or of law: this cannot continue.

Citizens must once again be taught that they, and only they, are responsible for their lives. A civilized nation provides for the helpless, the weak, and the defenseless. But it does not keep expanding that definition so far that it encompasses half of its citizens. A nation that values self-reliance and ambition must accept that "opportunity" encompasses the possibility of failure. Failure, even ruin, is a necessary and inevitable part of any economy. You cannot engineer failure out of the equation.  Either individuals must fail or the whole society will fail, but failure will occur.