Please explain why the sexual revolution of the ’20s was different from that of the 60s.

It’s not surprising that huge new entitlements are created when the economy can least afford them. That is the historic pattern.

In the UK, the largest expansions of the welfare state were created after WW1 and WW2. After WW1, Lloyd George promised to “create a nation fit for heroes”, even though GB was nearly bankrupt due to the cost of the war. After WW2, the Labour government brought in the National Health Service and nationalised the coal and steel industry even though the economy was in such bad shape that food and gasoline were still rationed. (gasoline was rationed until 1950 and meat was rationed in the UK until 1954)

Socialist systems are necessarily ones where every group is pitted against every other. Strikes are common and deals are cut for political support or for cover for some project or indiscretion. All energies are turned towards moving that one lever instead of doing productive things. This is the reason why socialist systems are fallow.

Why work hard when you can join a group of professors and not work at all to get your raise? Why be frugal and save when the government will take most of what you make and inflate away most of the rest so that you can never be secure except that you are one of the elite or have their ear? Better to be a courtier or apparatchik and use the lever of power than be a free man on whom it is used. Better to hold the whip…

Until one day… someone pushes the lever… and nothing happens.

And when that day comes no one will even remember how to make a proper lever.

when this man also is the good friend of the “evil” Putin, and was supported by the State Department of the former US administration, this doesn’t make of him an European , in the first meaning !

Vaklav is a joke

1938 Chamberlain.

2009 Socialism, the religion of the stomach, swallows Europe whole.

Harry Graf Kessler, the Red Count, jubilates.

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“EU Lisbon Treaty to become law within weeks after Czech president concedes defeat

The controversial Lisbon Treaty is set to become law within weeks after the Czech Republic’s eurosceptic president conceded his attempt to challenge it was futile. Vaclav Klaus, the only European Union leader who has still not signed the document, said he could not wait for a British general election next year which could lead to a Tory government and a possible referendum to bury the Treaty.

Mr Klaus said: “The train carrying the treaty is going so fast and it’s so far that it can’t be stopped or returned, no matter how much some of us would want that.”

Mr Klaus, who angered EU partners when he further delayed the ratification process by asking for an opt-out on the treaty earlier this month, said he still did not see the document as a good thing for “freedom in Europe.”"

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2364648/posts

Europe, particularly Western Europe, is a cowardly lot of nations. They have as their only real unifying principles hatred of the U.S., love for legal taxes (and illegal cheating of those taxes), and gutless surrender to the Islamic invaders who are openly bitchslapping the natives and extorting huge sums of protection money.

They are rapidly surrendering any actual freedoms they have to an unelected, unaccountable, deeply corrupt EU. The Euros I work with know their system sucks, they know it’s rotten and just waiting to be kicked over by an internal failure or an outside invasion, and they have nothing but a shrug as a response.

I recently had a Frenchman tell me that “violence never solves anything.” When I told him that it was only violence that allowed him to speak French instead of German, his answer was, “So what? German, French, what’s the difference?”

The Euros have the same pusillanimous attitude that led to Dukakis being held in such complete contempt. There is nothing they hold dear enough to fight for, and they openly admit it; the Euro effort in Afghanistan is a sad joke grudgingly yielded by them as payment for their NATO insurance. John Stuart Mill’s famous comment nails their pathetic state perfectly.

You can drop out by moving, be it to Texas, or Chile, or New Zealand.

But you can also drop out of American society, without resorting to tax evasion, by simply becoming a “net zero”. That is, produce no more than you consume. It leaves nothing for the looters.

If you’ve got wealth to store in the meantime, I’d strongly lean toward tangible, value-dense goods like gold, silver, diamonds, etc. These are hard for the government to track (especially when you hold them directly), legal to own, and largely immune from the looming inflation.