Analyst's note: Absolutely must read and consider. Sometimes it makes a difference if we hear it from someone else who is experiencing the problem. You'll want to read the entire original article as well.
"The ideas the President outlined in the State of the Union are based on the very model that is causing the EU to implode.
[....] What was it everybody used to say about the United States? Look at what’s happening over there and you will see our future. Whatever Americans are doing now, we will be catching up with them in another 10 years or so. In popular culture or political rhetoric, America led the fashion and we tagged along behind.
Well, so much for that. Barack Obama is now putting the United States squarely a decade behind Britain. Listening to the President’s State of the Union message last week was like a surreal visit to our own recent past: there were, almost word for word, all those interminable Gordon Brown Budgets that preached “fairness” while listing endless new ways in which central government would intervene in every form of economic activity.
[....] Obama is clearly living the Left-liberal dream, which still survives in small pockets of American life. He wants to import the democratic socialism that Europe embraced after the war, which was, for European cultural reasons, imbued with aristocratic paternalism and Marxist notions of bourgeois guilt. But neither of these things are part of the American historical experience. The Left-wing intellectuals, including Obama himself, who adopt this language are talking dangerously uninformed rubbish: if democratic socialism was ever a solution to Europe’s problems (and the present crisis is making that seem less and less likely), it is certainly not an answer to any question that Americans are likely to ask.
The United States is a country that was invented to allow people to be free of domination or persecution by the state. Its constitution and political institutions are specifically designed to prevent the federal government from oppressing the rights, or undermining the sense of responsibility, of the individual citizen. If it ceases to stand by that principle, then it will suffer a catastrophic loss of purpose and identity – as well as making a quite remarkably stupid and unnecessary mistake"
