-By Warner Todd Huston
The welfare state has grown too large to support any longer, says the Dutch King, Willem-Alexander. The King now says that the Dutch instead need to encourage a “participation society.”
In an address to his country, the King insisted that their welfare state programs are “unsustainable in their current form.”
In his “new” society, the King said, people would be responsible for themselves and their own futures and families and should expect less help from the government.
This speech, especially if the Dutch government follows this up with actions–and that is already happening–marks a very key turning point in the socialist European welfare state mentality. As more countries begin to realize that they will be forced to follow the example of the Dutch King, the welfare state will begin a long road to being pared back, pruned, cut, and chopped to a more logical, manageable size.
This will also affect the USA as the far left will lose a chief talking point. Most leftists scoff at conservatives that say we need to cut government and they point to socialist Europe to “prove” that an ever growing, wildly over spent welfare state is perfectly logical. It works over there, they claim.
But it isn’t working over there. It is failing and the Europeans are right at the beginning of finally realizing this unalterable fact.
The last people on the planet to learn this lesson, though, will be American left-wingers.
They are a slow and stupid people.
On the other hand, the Dutch have been mugged by reality.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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