Where We're Headed

CNBC has a story about the EU "saving the banks but losing a generation."  It's a stark and startling insight into how they got where they are, and where we are headed if we don't fix things.

Forget the debt crisis.  Forget the austerity riots.  One quote sums up all the problems they're having, and that we will have:
"We saved the banks but are running the risk of losing a generation," said Martin Schulz, a German socialist who has led the European Parliament, the EU's only directly elected institution, since January last year.

"One of the biggest threats to the European Union is that people entirely lose their confidence in the capacity of the EU to solve their problems. And if the younger generation is losing trust, then in my eyes the European Union is in real danger," he told Reuters in an interview.

Think about that for a moment.  "One of the biggest threats to the European Union is that people entirely lose their confidence in the capacity of the EU to solve their problems."

Let's break this down.
First: His statement assumes that the EU could solve anyone's problems anyway.  No government can solve people's problems.  The EU less than most, since it is not really a government in any meaningful sense anyway.  Even if the government could solve your problem, it could only do so by causing someone else a problem.

Second: His statement completely ignores where people got this fallacious idea in the first place: the Statist policies of Marx and others who believed that Government should "do something."  The idea of Government "doing something," is one that says the Government should be your parent, your nanny, and your boss.  Nothing you do can escape government control.

If the EU wants to fix its unemployment crisis it must take the opposite tack.  Get government as far out of people's lives as possible.  Yes, the lesson will be painful- as many such lessons are.  But it will be better for them in the long run if people realize that it is their job to care for themselves, not the government's job to "solve their problems."

And we are on the same path.  This same theory that the government should "solve [our] problems" is what drives the Democrat party.  It is the theory that says we must take from those who have succeeded and give to those who have failed.  It is the theory that says the Government can, let alone should, mandate that people engage in a specific economic activity.  It is the theory that says people chosen for government service are somehow more special, more qualified, more Human than everyone else, and so only they should be allowed the right to defend themselves.

We must return to the individualism of our past.  We must return to that pioneer spirit that said, "I'll take care of myself.  If I absolutely can't, my family will help."  We must return to the ideas of self-reliance and self-sufficiency.

And we will.  One way or another it will happen.  Either we will change voluntarily and relatively painlessly, or we will change reluctantly and very painfully.  In either case, reality will not be denied. 

We're like a house of cards built on an earthquake generator, and someone's hand is on the switch.  Either we unplug the generator, or we'll all come crashing down.