If we are to survive the looming catastrophe, we need to face the truth


What Byron is learning is that he was wrong.

The argument I always made was that no economy can support both a socialist welfare state and a global military. I thought that Europe's social democracies could exist only because the U.S. was paying Europe's defense costs. (Which always made it galling to listen to smug Euro-talk about how pitifully inadequate the U.S. social safety net is compared with their cradle-to-grave support systems.)

But no. The economic collapse in Europe is demonstrating that the entitlement state is not supportable all by itself.  It simply cannot control the demand for ever-expanding services and their ever-ballooning costs, and it contains too many disincentives to economic productivity and wealth creation.

The longer-term results of Europe's great post-war experiment are finally coming in, and they tell us that what didn't work under communism doesn't work under capitalism, either. The socialist dream is over and done.

The politics of the coming transition are going to be extremely difficult. It was easy to introduce and expand entitlements, but reducing them won't be. I doubt it could be accomplished at all without a full-blown debt crisis that threatens economic collapse. Since that is where we now know socialism inevitably leads, we can also see that the system always contained the seeds of its own demise.

Obama? He's so far behind the curve that he's mostly irrelevant, his "tax the rich" rhetoric of class war laughably unserious and beside the point. He's still a believer that socialism can work. Obama has become a relic.

Byron