George Will observes that the spectre of real world consequences is haunting Barack Obama and his democrat allies.

Concerning the job numbers from May, one can almost echo Henry James’s exclamation after examining letters pertaining to Lord Byron’s incest: “Nauseating perhaps, but how quite inexpressibly significant.” Except that the May numbers’ significance can be expressed: A theory is being nibbled to death by facts.

Private-sector job creation almost stopped in May.

The Progressive attempt to change America into a European-style Socialist Welfare State in the midst of an economic crisis has, it is increasingly becoming clear, prevented the recovery that should now be well underway, and deepened the misery.

Americans are experiencing hard times, wholesale bank and business failures, joblessness, and home foreclosures in a fashion not seen since the Great Depression.

All this coincides with state government bankruptcies and a European crisis caused by exactly the same policies. Governments everywhere are discovering the truth of Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “the problem with Socialism is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.

Democrats are going to be annihilated in next November’s elections.

Jonah Goldberg argues that the hedonic consumerism nightmare of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) has proven more accurately prophetic of the dystopian direction of Modernity than the brutal collectivism of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949).

[P]olitics is increasingly a vehicle for delivering prepackaged joy. America’s political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now more and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered. And though it has been the subject of high school English essay questions for generations, we have not gotten much closer to answering the question, what exactly was so bad about the Brave New World?

Simply this: it is fool’s gold. The idea that we can create a heaven on earth through pharmacology and neuroscience is as utopian as the Marxist hope that we could create a perfect world by rearranging the means of production. The history of totalitarianism is the history of the quest to transcend the human condition and create a society where our deepest meaning and destiny are realized simply by virtue of the fact that we live in it. It cannot be done, and even if, as often in the case of liberal fascism, the effort is very careful to be humane and decent, it will still result in a kind of benign tyranny where some people get to impose their ideas of goodness and happiness on those who may not share them.

“Homer was wrong in saying: ‘Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!’ He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away.”—Heraclitus of Ephesus

Russia knows how to deal with pirates: “They could not reach the coast and, apparently, have all died.”

Hat tip to John C. Meyer.
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Robert Samuelson: What we’re seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state.
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Jewish World Review: Elena Kagan let Charles Ogletree and Larry Tribe get away with plagiarism. Harvard Crimson story.

Mark Steyn argues that it can happen here, that the ideology of the left can alter the national character and turn a nation of self reliant individualists into whining clients of a socialist nanny state in terminal decline, and Barack Obama is here to prove it.

[W]hat are we to make of the British? They were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the world. Even as their colonies advanced to independence, they retained the English language and English legal system, not to mention cricket and all kinds of other cultural ties. And even in imperial retreat, there is no rational basis for late-20th-century Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal, and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such a fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one.

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once-golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California become the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.” Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 percent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” — the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something,” the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain. ...

In the modern era, the two halves of “the West” form a mirror image. “The Old World” has thousand-year-old churches and medieval street plans and ancient hedgerows but has been distressingly susceptible to every insane political fad, from Communism to Fascism to European Union. “The New World” has a superficial novelty — you can have your macchiato tweeted directly to your iPod — but underneath the surface noise it has remained truer to old political ideas than “the Old World” ever has. Economic dynamism and political continuity seem far more central to America’s sense of itself than they are to most nations’. Which is why it’s easier to contemplate Spain or Germany as a backwater than America. In a fundamental sense, an America in eclipse would no longer be America.

But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, “decline is a choice.” The Democrats are offering it to the American people, and a certain proportion of them seem minded to accept. Enough to make decline inevitable? To return to the young schoolboy on his uncle’s shoulders watching the Queen-Empress’s jubilee, in the words of Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder.”

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Senior advocate of the European Court of Justice Paolo Mengozzi denounced British suspension of welfare benefits to wives of persons believed to be affiliated with al Qaeda or the Taliban in a 26-page written opinion which declared welfare support to be a human right. A final ruling is expected in a few months.

Terrorist spouses had previous appeals for restoration of income support, child benefit and housing assistance rejected in Britain and subsequently appealed to the European Court of Justice, whose decisions are binding on Britain’s Parliament and courts.

Daily Mail:

Ministers have halted benefit payouts made to the families of suspected terrorists to prevent the money falling into the hands of banned groups. ...

Whitehall officials have refused to name the families involved in the test cases – but all three of the husbands are foreign nationals on the United Nations list of international terror suspects.

They have been linked by security officials to Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban

The payouts to their wives include income support, child benefit and housing assistance worth ‘several hundred’ pounds a week.

Terry Jeffrey, at Town Hall, finds that the Obama Administration is already selling the 2010 Census as a welfare project.

The Constitution mandates that a census be taken every 10 years so that the members of the House of Representatives can be apportioned among the states according to their population.

But as the Census Bureau prepares to undertake the 2010 census, it is planning to stress a far different purpose for the population count, according to its own carefully crafted communications plan.

This plan is detailed in a 351-page Census Bureau document titled “2010 Census Integrated Communications Campaign Plan” that is posted on the bureau’s Website.

On page 10 of this plan, the bureau states that the “unifying idea for all communications” about the 2010 census is: “Only you can make the census ours.”

It says that this idea will be “expressed in the marketplace” through the phrase, “It’s in our hands.”

“This is the broad, overarching platform, unifying all messaging,” the plan says of the phrase, “It’s in our hands.”

Now, these phrases may look to you like lyrics from a Barry Manilow song, but to the people running next year’s constitutionally mandated count of all people in the United States, they are very serious words. ...

On page 29 of its plan, the Census Bureau explains “What ‘Only You Can Make the Census Ours’ Means”—doing so in the imagined words of a U.S. resident being asked to participate in the census.

Participating in the census, it turns out, is all about “change” and “more funding.”

“I have an opportunity to help make a difference for my community, my family and myself,” says the imagined resident. “It’s literally in my hands, in the form of the 2010 Census questionnaire. The Census is much more than a piece of paper. It’s a tool that I can put to work to ignite positive change.

“My participation in the 2010 Census can be the tipping point that helps make change possible,” says the Census Bureau’s imagined U.S. resident. “And the more of us who fill out and mail back the Census, the more of us who want to tell a friend, to tell a friend, to tell a friend, the more funding we might get to help improve our lives and the lives of those who are important to us.”

In other words, the person the Census Bureau imagines it is targeting with its communications plan is not someone who looks at himself as a net payer of taxes but someone who looks at himself as a net taker of government funding.

It’s really about making the contents of your wallet “theirs.”

The Obama Administration has an answer: release them in the United States and put them on welfare. Before long, presumably, ACORN will be taking them to the polls to vote democrat.

Thomas Joscelyn quotes a news agency report and comments.

Bad as the democrat stimulus package is on the surface, Charles Hurt notes that it contains a covert clause with far-reaching ramifications.

Buried deep inside the massive spending orgy that Democrats jammed through the House this week lie five words that could drastically undo two decades of welfare reforms.

The very heart of the widely applauded Welfare Reform Act of 1996 is a cap on the amount of federal cash that can be sent to states each year for welfare payments.

But, thanks to the simple phrase slipped into the legislation, the new “stimulus” bill abolishes the limits on the amount of federal money for the so-called Emergency Fund, which ships welfare cash to states.

“Out of any money in the Treasury of the United States not otherwise appropriated, there are appropriated such sums as are necessary for payment to the Emergency Fund,” Democrats wrote in Section 2101 on Page 354 of the $819 billion bill. In other words, the only limit on welfare payments would be the Treasury itself.

“This re-establishes the welfare state and creates dependency all over the place,” said one startled budget analyst after reading the line.

In addition to reopening the floodgates of dependency on federal welfare programs, the change once again deepens the dependency of state governments on the federal government.

William Voegeli, in the Fall edition of the Claremont Review of Books, argues that Americans ought to think rationally about the American Welfare State.

Voegeli contends that, though conservatives will never succeed in repealing the New Deal, the public is fundamentally unwilling to pay for significantly greater expansions, the problem of persistent poverty really stems from causes federal money cannot effectively address, and meanwhile ideology and illusions prevent sensible allocation of limited resources.

In a society that is remarkably prosperous by global and historical standards, shouldn’t “most vulnerable members” be construed as referring to the most vulnerable 5, 10, or 25% of the population—not just the abjectly miserable, let us concede, but people confronting serious threats or problems? Yet when it turns out, time and again, that the effective meaning of liberal welfare and social insurance programs is to elicit compassion and government subventions for the most “vulnerable” 75, 80, or 95% of the population, it’s hard not to feel scammed. ...

.. Paul Starr of Princeton University and the American Prospect, says the welfare state is about the poor. Its “objective should be, above all, to eliminate poverty and maintain a minimum floor of decency to enable individuals to carry out their own life plans.” But giving benefits to everyone, not just the most vulnerable, serves social and political purposes. Socially, “the long-term tasks of nation-building and of fostering a common culture and a sense of shared citizenship also strongly argue for public and universal schooling, old-age pensions, and other services that serve an integrative as well as egalitarian purpose,” according to Starr. Politically, the imperative to construct democratic majorities that support programs for the poor “will often mean support for programs that provide universal benefits.” We may say that such programs “target” the most vulnerable 100% of the population.

Read the whole thing.