Old Europe
Mark Steyn has an astute take on the recent German elections. His column begins by demonstrating how a story from southern France typifies the social welfare problem facing Europe as a whole:
If you want the state of Europe in a nutshell, skip the German election coverage and consider this news item from the south of France: a fellow in Marseilles is being charged with fraud because he lived with the dead body of his mother for five years in order to continue receiving her pension of 700 euros a month.
She was 94 when she croaked, so she'd presumably been enjoying the old government cheque for a good three decades or so, but her son figured he might as well keep the money rolling in until her second century and, with her corpse tucked away under a pile of rubbish in the living room, the female telephone voice he put on for the benefit of the social services office was apparently convincing enough. As the Reuters headline put it: "Frenchman lived with dead mother to keep pension."
That's the perfect summation of Europe: welfare addiction over demographic reality.
Think of Germany as that flat in Marseilles, and Mr Schröder's government as the stiff, and the country's many state benefits as that French bloke's dead mum's benefits.
1 Comments:
For all the gloating Europe has done over Katrina, all the claims that if we just got over our silly fascination with limited government and separation of powers then our national government would be able to handle something like this... For all that preening and posing, it's still Europe that allowed 40,000 elderly people to die last summer in a heat wave, 15,000 in France alone. Kind of shoots down the theory that simply enlarging the scope of responsibility of the state will solve all of society's problems.
Katrina, and the subsequent New Deal reaction by our President, is a clear statement of the absence of conservatism in either party right now. It's not just the massive handouts they're planning - it's the utopian idea that the state has the power to control and prevent tragedies like Katrina. When Britain was facing certain death and destruction in WWII, Churchill didn't promise that things would be better in the future, or that if things had been done this way or that way that tragedy could have been avoided. He said, "Never give up." The nobility of the human race, the only recourse since the toil and thorns of the fall, the race that Paul spoke of, is simply to never give up. This is a fallen world. People will die. Terrible things will happen. Utopian ideals of a protecting, all-powerful national government only hurt people, because those ideas breed laziness, breakdown in community, lawlessness, complete and utter dependency, and socioeconomic strife. Recognition of our plight, on the other hand, and trust in God, and obedience to His natural and revealed law, will result in the opposite. Katrina, I hope, will teach Mississippi that lesson; from what I'm hearing from the coast, it already is.
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