As Denmark goes?
Once a population has been welfarized, can a nation go back?
Countries in Europe are facing problems as they start to run out of what Margaret Thatcher called “other people’s money.” So Denmark is trying, at least a little bitty bit, to rethink the welfare system, and finding it tough going:
“In the past, people never asked for help unless they needed it,” said Karen Haekkerup, the minister of social affairs and integration, who has been outspoken on the subject. “My grandmother was offered a pension and she was offended. She did not need it.
“But now people do not have that mentality. They think of these benefits as their rights. The rights have just expanded and expanded. And it has brought us a good quality of life. But now we need to go back to the rights and the duties. We all have to contribute.”
Good luck with that.
[NOTE: I thought I’d coined the term “welfarized” for this post. But apparently not.]
Being such a small nation, Denmark connects the polity to the politicians a tad closer than now typical.
The result is that Liberal Danish politicians are being forced by events to eat their own cooking.
They’re finding it over salted.
http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/04/the-socialist-mayor-in-norrebro-my-life-in-a-no-go-zone/
This ^^^^ is an eye-opening blog post.
Once a population has been welfarized, can a nation go back?
Maybe, just maybe:
Caroline Glick, “Israel — The Happy Little Country“
I was wondering what impact immigration had on this in addition to the native Danes out of work and/or on the dole. In addition to the gangs mentioned in blert’s link, there’s also been a marked increase in rapes in Denmark in recent years.
Not gonna be easy, but going broke and cold-turkey is much more painful.
Denmark, being a small country, it would be considerably more difficult than here to convince the electorate that there is some Scrooge McDuck sitting on piles of ill-gotten currency in his airplane hanger size vault.
Yes, it is possible to run out of money. What is more difficult is convincing a useful portion of the electorate of the idea. The bigger and more complicated the country, the more difficult.
sdfeer…
Petro-wealth is an extreme moral hazard to a polity.
I give you Holland and Norway.
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Subsidized energy prices cause the economy to become wasteful; even dependent.
The best use is to attain strategic policy independence from Washington, a city of corrupted policy analysis.
Darth Wan is disestablishing American hegemony….
He’s following his programming, what else?
The short answer is yes…
…for precisely one election cycle.
‘Tisn’t about the development of gas and oil supplies blert, but about something which has occurred to the people of the place, not necessarily even connected to material conditions. Something indistinct in origin, though very distinct as embodied in the children being born, and with them, the reconnection with joyful purpose in life. Eyes — or minds — appear to be opening.
blert:
Thanks for the Norrebro link.
My reading is not hopeful. The mayor of Copenhagen, a resident of Norrebro, proposes to deal with the Norrebro muslim gangs by gentrifying Norrebro (at doubtless great kroner and time cost), and ultimately driving these gangs elsewhere, displaced by Danish metrosexuals, to become someone else’s problem.
That may be an eventual fix for Norrebro, but it is not a solution for Copenhagen or Denmark.
This reminds me of back when the Soviet Union and its basket-case satellites all were crumbling.
There seemed to be an abundant store of literature (books, essays, etc.) concerned with the transition from market-based economy to something more collectivist or socialist . . .
but next to zero on transitioning from collectivism -slash- socialism to something more market-based.
It’s as if — no, it ^is^ exactly — it never occurred to most intellectual “thinkers” that there would be any cause to consider the latter transition.
History is a one-way ratchet, don’tcha know . . .
The Left in the US have their own version of rape. They just call it the porn industry.
Neo, look what I found!
John Gielgud as “The Grand Inquisitor”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om6HcUUa8DI
Almost the whole of his apologia pro sua vita to Jesus in the prison. Darkly disturbing.
Beware of Haekkerup’s last line in the quote: “We all have to contribute.” Coercion is implied in “have”; “have to contribute” smacks of forced collectivism. There is nothing moral about her statement. No “It is wrong, this granting of rights and money to fund those rights”.
Sweden has actually stepped back from socialism. At this point they are are about the same level of socialism as the US, although it is, of course, different (there are areas where they are deeper, other areas where we are).
I think Sweden is an example of a country that was able to begin a pull back from socialism. But they can get away with things many others cannot.
The issue is not specifically welfare or redistributive change; although, in a democratic republic particularly, that is the means by which a select minority rule. The issue is generally that a dissociation of risk causes corruption. While dreams of material, physical, and ego instant (or immediate) gratification motivates its progress.
The challenge is to mitigate the influence of men and women who exploit these dreams to advance their own political, economic, and social standing. This is usually where competing interests keep the honest people honest and others from running amuck. This is precisely the reason why left-wing regimes, including: communism, socialism, fascism, etc., are failures by design. They operate through coercion or fraud to establish monopolies or sponsor monopolistic behavior enforced through granted or stolen authority.
In a left-wing regime, not only does society rot from the head, but also from the tail, which together consume the body.
The answer is yes. Great Britain did it under Margaret Thatcher’s leadership. But, as they lay her to rest, they are heading back toward the welfare state.
Read about it here in this insightful essay by Spengler:
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/04/11/goodbye-to-blighty/#comments
JJ-
a great lady, but her work was incomplete, she was sabotaged by others in her own administration, and her work is being undone.
The Left is like Dracula; hard to kill, keeps coming back. We are darn near out of garlic!
Don Carlos: “We are darn near out of garlic!”
If only garlic was the cure. :>}
Welfare tends to dry up the vitality of a people. It will take quite a large amount of blood sacrifice to revitalize things.
That blood must flow from both patriots and tyrants, no other. Killing a bunch of school children, for example, would do nothing to tip the scales one way or the other.
The concept that a nation should be saved by a man or woman in a leadership position is exactly why that nation deserves to be damned to hell for eternal torment.
There is no such thing as righteous entitlement to salvation at somebody else’s sacrifice. Without virtue, the people neither deserve to be saved nor will be saved.
Ymar:
We are well on our (collective) way. Have been for 100 years. We are damned to a living hell.