Terminal, and Contagious
by Nebojsa Malic
On August 1, the Imperial capital’s conservative daily, the Washington Times, carried an interesting http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2281. Paul Belien, author of A Throne in Brussels, warned against the peril of “liberal politicians, like Hillary Clinton” seeking to transform the U.S. into a more Europe-like welfare state. Welfare statism, warned Belien, is a “dreaded affliction” that has destroyed Europe. Secularism and liberalism alike seek to “replace God by the state.”
It is a bit disingenuous to blame “liberals” alone for the worship of State as god, when “conservatives” have been as guilty of it since 1945. To Belien, America must look like a land of true liberty. But when you compare it to the tyranny in Brussels, that’s not hard.
A Dreaded Affliction
Belien argues, convincingly, that the American revolution was about liberty, while the European revolutions that followed were about replacing absolute monarchies with totalitarian republics. (Hans-Hermann Hoppe has done a superb analysis of just how “tyrannical” those old monarchies were, in http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe4.html.) From Jacobins to Bolsheviks, with each “revolution” Europe became less free. Now, however, Belien sees the same hankering for an omnipotent State among American politicians as exists among their European counterparts. More welfare, more planning, more control, more taxes, more laws… if that were truly a solution, wouldn’t Europeans have felt it by now?
In fact, they have – only nowhere near the way American admirers of European welfare-statism would want people to think:
“Contemporary Europe is in crisis. Its welfare systems are running out of money. Its moral and legal order is breaking down, while the influence of radical Islam is growing. Its nation-states are being undermined by the European Union. Most Europeans look on passively. After three generations of welfare dependency, they have lost the ability to take their fate into their own hands.” […
“Europe does not particularly care about the future: It is only interested in enjoying the present. This attitude also explains why Europe’s demographics have collapsed. People who are not prepared to make sacrifices for the future do not invest in children.”
http://www.antiwar.com/malic/?articleid=11423