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| Britain |
| The New Britannia-Steyn |
| 2011-08-13 |
| This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want” to be accomplished by “co-operation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life’s vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.” The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. From page 204: “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”.  I believe it is regarded as a sign of insanity to start quoting oneself, but at the risk of trying your patience I’ll try one more, because it’s the link between America’s downgraded debt and Britain’s downgraded citizenry: “The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people.” Big Government means small citizens: It corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population. When you’re imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own. There are lessons for all of us there. |
| Posted by:Beavis |
| #3 For all you know the Swedes just never did it long enough to burn through all their social capital from before the welfare state. Also, I suspect WW1 and 2 both burned through a lot of the UK's social capital even before that. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2011-08-13 19:02 |
| #2 Steyn is wrong. Soft Euro style socialism does work in homogenous cohesive societies. The Swedes amongst others proved this. The problem is that immigration and multiculturalism fragments society. Such that socialism and soft policing no longer works. With the debt problems and austerity I see this problem only getting worse. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2011-08-13 17:14 |
| #1 British culture & society has been rotting for decades. Starting to smell pretty bad now. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-08-13 12:00 |