The End of Democratic Socialism

[There...]
The end of democratic socialism is at hand. The welfare states of the U.S. and Europe are financially out of control, spent and unsustainable. They have reached the point that Margaret Thatcher defined as the end of socialism: They have run out of other people's money.

These areas of the world are about to change dramatically. Victor Davis Hanson has a piece in National Review Online focused on Europe. His comments, while directed at Europe, are also applicable to the United States...

That Europe's socialist model had led to relatively modest growth over the last decade in comparison with other advanced economies, that unemployment in Europe was likewise chronically high, and that worker productivity was static were always downplayed or at least balanced by "quality of life" counterpoints. Who cared that, over the last decade, much of Europe saw economic growth at only 50 to 75 percent the U.S. rate per annum, or that it struggled with 10 percent unemployment, or that it discouraged start-up companies, when the quality of life there was so much better for so many more people than anywhere else?

The "there's-no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch" axiom applies in both free markets and socialist economies. Quality of life is a function of many things. While it means different things to different people, the common denominator is wealth creation. Even if you have little interest in wealth per se, wealth provides the options that enable one to select his own version of quality of life. Economies that do not create wealth provide few options. Economies that do not create wealth cannot improve the quality of life on any sustainable basis, and are therefore doomed to implosion...

No amount of spin, politicking, or legislation can avoid what is coming. The world is changing forever, at least for those of us alive today. The political class has as much chance of altering what is happening as they do of repealing the law of gravity.

[But rather than learn from the painful proof being supplied us by Europe's failure, we're actually accelerating our adoption of the very same policies...]

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