“Does this mean they are imprisoned?”, Dan asked rhetorically. “Is someone holding them at gunpoint?”

Well, these questions may have answers in Dan’s own essay, “A Picture of How Redistribution Programs TRAP the Less Fortunate in Lives of Dependency”.

Here’s another reminder: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rls8H6MktrA#t=3m10s

When a developed world level of medicine, developed world level of education, and modest housing is unconditionally provided, then, for most people, the non pecuniary enjoyment of virtually unlimited free time, tramples the effort of making a living inside four office walls, even if your income was going to double ( which means your pre-tax earnings have to triple or quadruple since you will now have to pay into all this HopNChange).

Much is said about tax disincentives to production on the most competent. Virtually nothing is said about the indolence inviting policies if insulating the less competent from the consequence of mediocrity. There’s an obvious reason for the asymmetry: Who wants, or who can afford, to insult the majority that elects them. This is why the suicidal decline of western world voter-lemmings is irreversible. In hardly a generation’s time, their decline will conclude, and they will still be in denial about its root cause.

So is it any wonder why Britain, France, Germany, Sweeden etc. are all, have been, and will be on a one to two percent growth trendline, thus relentlessly losing three to four percent a year of their international prosperity standing in a world that is growing by five percent? Eventually, even the level of those unconditionally guaranteed freebies (healthcare, education, housing) will no longer be developed world level. For the western world voter-lemming, the mood will get ever more somber. My fear is that western world voter-lemmings will act so suicidally in their imposition of collective economic management and democratic totalitarianism that even dictatorships with modest reason will be able to overtake them. That will be a very unfortunate outcome for liberty, though in the end, few will escape and the Darwinian natural selection of cultures based on efficiency, productivity and thus growth will continue. That I’m confident about, but interesting times await. Especially for the delusional and suicidal less than one billion voter-lemmings of the western world.

Yes, the welfare state is broken, and yes, we probably need to see specific examples of it as well as statistics. But vilifying individuals for acting in a way *entirely consistent with basic economics* is not only unhelpful, it brings classical liberalism into disrepute.

See also: http://www.talkcarswell.com/home/dont-call-folk-scroungers/2569