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January 4, 2011

There MAY NOT Always Be an England

What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital?

The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what lbj’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. One-fifth of British children are raised in homes in which no adult works. Just under 900,000 people have been off sick for over a decade, claiming “sick benefits,” week in, week out, for ten years and counting. “Indolence,” as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a free society, but rarely has any state embraced this oldest temptation as literally as Britain. There is almost nothing you can’t get the government to pay for. -- Dependence Day by Mark Steyn - The New Criterion

Posted by Vanderleun at January 4, 2011 1:26 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

One day, people may actually start thinking something along the lines of..."gee, do you really think it would have been that much worse if Hitler had won....?'

Posted by: Blastineau at January 4, 2011 1:42 PM

One problem about this is that if you are in a marginal situation, and able to do what is being described here (which by the way is nowhere near as easy as described) then, given that so many other people are doing it, you are doing nothing except harming yourself by not going along with it.

My opinion is that it has suited successive UK governments (of all ideological flavours) to do nothing about the abuse of sick pay and disability benefit. Why? Simple. People "on the sick" don't get counted in the unemployment statistics.

There is a related problem. Such benefits are a gateway to further ones, such as help with transport costs and energy bills, grants for house improvements such as insulation, and so on.

Simply put; if you live in a socialist country it is utterly stupid not to take as much advantage as you can. You don't get any credit for not going along with it, and the bank won't stop its charges thereby, and...

The other problem with UK govenment (and I strongly suspect with most others including the US) was lampooned mercilessly by the scriptwriters of "Yes Minister". Briefly put, elected officials do NOT run the government.

Posted by: Fletcher Christian at January 5, 2011 2:50 AM

My favorite British joke:

Q: Why don't the British manufacture computers?

A: They haven't found a way to make them leak oil.

Okay, I know it's bad to kick a guy when he's down.

Posted by: Gottafang at January 5, 2011 7:33 AM

There is indeed a manly and legitimate passion for equality which rouses in all men a desire to be strong and respected. This passion tends to elevate the little man to the rank of the great. But the human heart also nourishes a debased taste for equality, which leads the weak to ant to drag the strong down to their level and which induces men to prefer equality in servitude to inequality in freedom. It is not that peoples with a democratic social state naturally scorn freedom; on the contrary, they have an instinctive taste for it. But freedom is not the chief and continual object of their desires; it is equality for which they feel an eternal love; the rush on freedom with quick and sudden impulses, but if they miss their mark they resign themselves to their disappointment; but nothing will satisfy them without equality, and they would rather die than than lose it.
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville.

The United States has been infected with the slim of the debased strain of equality for some time which explains the elections of Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Clinton, G. W. Bush, and Barack Obama, and the willful blindness of Congresses to the disaster they were creating.

Posted by: St. Thor at January 5, 2011 9:12 AM

damn

Posted by: RedCarolina at January 6, 2011 5:24 AM

Gottafang,

They did manufacture computers in the Thatcher years. Not bad ones for the time, either. So did the U.S. of A. back then.

Today, computers everywhere sport a "Made in..." followed by the familiar five letters beginning with C.

Posted by: Fearless Ferenc at January 6, 2011 8:36 AM

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