Frank J Fleming has a great post about the direction of government. The idea is that a child has a certain freedom, not having to pay the mortgage or get a job. They have a few things they need to do, but that's about it. The downside is that adults make all their major decisions, and sometimes those decisions are wrong. If parents, who know the child better than anyone and who cares for that child more than anyone, make mistakes, just how bad would it be if some bureaucrat who cares nothing for a person, who is unaccountable to that person, makes their decisions?
Adults live in a different kind of freedom. They make their own decisions, and their mistakes can be serious. They do have to pay the mortgage or lose the house. They do have to keep a job or suffer the consequences. But if they make a mistake, it's their own mistake.
When a government decides that its citizens are like children, it will start giving those citizens a child's freedom instead of an adult's freedom. We've been going down that road for many decades.
At first you won't be able to smoke cigarettes because they're bad for you. Then you won't be able to do high risk activities because they're dangerous. Before long, you become a child of the state, whether you want to be or not.
Europe can get away with this more easily than the US because they have common cultures. French people generally accept French ways. German people accept German ways. Same for British, etc. But the quiet little fact is how unassimilated their immigrants are, and the clashes are getting serious.
In the US, it's hard to imagine Texans being succesfully micro-managed by Chicagoans. And vice versa. Bush vs Obama vs those who dislike them both.
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