Mark Steyn has a gift with words and is the most interesting conservative commentator around.
"Europe" has
a basic identity crisis: As the Germans have begun to figure out, just because
the Greeks live in the same general neighborhood is no reason to open a joint
checking account. And yet a decade ago, when it counted, everyone who mattered
on the Continent assumed a common currency for nations with nothing in common
was so obviously brilliant an idea it was barely worth explaining to the
masses. In the absence of ethnic or cultural compatibility, the European Union
offered Big Government as a substitute: The project was propped up by two
pillars — social welfare and defense welfare. The former regulated Europe into
economic sloth even as India, China, and Brazil began figuring out how this
capitalism thing worked. The latter meant that the U.S. defense umbrella
ensured once-lavish budgets for hussars and lancers could be reallocated to
government health care and other lollipops — and it still wasn't enough.
Whatever the individual merits of ever-more-leisurely education, 30-hour work
weeks, six weeks' vacation, retirement at 50, the cumulative impact is that not
enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. And once large
numbers of people acquire the habits of a leisured class, there are not many
easy ways back to reality.
