End of the Line for the Welfare State?

Townhall.com ^ | February 11, 2014 | Pat Buchanan

[ex-snook]

"Many took to starting their own businesses (including us) and creating value, thus adding to the real wealth of this nation."

Have you thanked God that we made you better than those without your ability?

[griswold3]

I didn’t see a sarcasm tag there. Maybe you should edit.

[GeronL]

Socialist Venezuela is about to become Starving Venezuela

That doesn’t happen by accident. It seems to be happening slower here than it does in some places is all

[lentulusgracchus]

[Art.] But we may be coming to the end of the line. From Detroit to Greece to Puerto Rico, government's ability to expand the benefits of the welfare class by taxing the working and middle class is reaching its limit.

Taxpayers are rebelling, budgets are falling dangerously out of balance, and the welfare state is beginning to buckle under the load.

The point of the Welfare State was always, for liberals, to compete with the pie-in-the-sky lies of the Marxist-Leninists. The idea was to smooth off enough of the rough edges of capitalism, that the Communist propaganda wouldn't bite with working people. It didn't quite work, but liberals went ahead anyway, tinkering and enlarging as they went.

Cloward-Piven was and is the response of the Communists: to overload and break the welfare state, throw working people into desperate straits, and then conspiratorially seize the leadership of their institutions and sound the charge on the Winter Palace gates.

And then start killing people.

Nobody, but nobody, outside the conservative movement, has ever sought to take on the Communist ideology head-on, but instead to use the Welfare State to palliate, to blunt, and to turn gently aside the discontentments of the People with large slatherings of Other People's Money.

[lentulusgracchus]

Socialist Venezuela is about to become Starving Venezuela

Then comes Stalinist Venezuela.

[GeronL]

bump

The state-run media in Venezuela (almost all of it) continues to air hours and hours of government officials blaming the US imperialists (and the US lackeys of the opposition) for all their trouble

[lentulusgracchus]

Hmm, what or whom does that remind us of? Can it be a coincidence, that Venezuelan Communists ape our _Resident?