I’m thinking I should start knitting, just in case.
(smile) Not sure if knitting will be an approved activity, it might be viewed as nonproductive or harmful to the body with all that repetitive motion.
A superb article. Between ennui, uncontrolled immigration, and state-funded bread and circuses, social democracy is beginning to look more and more like Rome before the fall. The EU cannot stop it because the sort of sloppy egalitarianism that results in a two-tiered society is one of its founding notions. Individual European countries can recover from it once the EU breaks up, which is beginning to look like an even bet. Individual states within those countries can recover from it. Towns, villages - what we see here in the name of human freedom is the devolution of monolithic government. It isn't a new idea. Marx insisted one had to go through a stage of massive central government to get there but it would appear that the latter is actually the end state and the former a mirage. The state never does wither away, it only grows and festers.
America's secret has always been "build it and they will come" - "Land Of Opportunity" is more than an advertising slogan, it's the assurance that you will get to keep what you earn, a blunt principle that has been steadily chipped away at by people who don't. The more socialistic a country turns, the more that tendency is that you get to keep what you steal. It should be no surprise that it results in a government of thieves drawn from a ruling class of thieves.
Hence Mr. 0bama, whose resume of honest work could be written on a postage stamp. Hence the Clintons, whose principal labor was jobbing the legal system, Mr. Gore, a Tennessee thoroughbred whose antecedents are purely ruling class and whose mansion appears exempt from the laws he proposes for others, Mr. Edwards, whose own mansion was constructed on the proceeds of a lawsuit that ostensibly was to protect The People from The Corporations; the list is long and very familiar. It is an aristocracy of thieves, and the government it intends to run is a kleptocracy. Nice work if you can talk your way into it.