Rioting Students

If there ever was a best example of the problem with nations handing out entitlement checks to favored constituents, it is the incident Friday in which rampaging student protesters in London attacked a car carrying Prince Charles and his wife Camilla as it drove through London's West End as they, ironically, to go to a charity event. Haha. Charity is what is on those protesters minds too, but it is charity for themselves that motivated the to attack their figure head royal couple.

A group of up about 20 protesters, some chanting "Off with their heads!" (at least they are literate enough to copy the Alice in Wonderland equally bizarre shouter), smashed one of the royal couple's rear car windows and splashed white paint on the vehicle. All of this in protest to the fact that the dying social welfare state that is Britain has decided to stop paying the college tuition for University students. That's right, they want to off the heads of Prince Charles because they are indignant at no longer receiving free college tuition.

How bad is it when rioters storm the gates not for food or shelter, but because they think mommy and daddy government should pay their school bills? And that is what is happening all throughout Europe these days. the entitlements have become needs , not wants, and removing any of them, even in the name of fiscal sanity, just will not do. No doubt, few of the protesting students have ever given thought that they should work themselves to and for their own university education. but then, why should they. Britain and most of Europe has been on a entitlement binge in the name of social welfare since the end of World War II.

And the United States is in am imitating mode, deeply into the same foolhardy mindset of "gimme, gimme, mine" that the Europeans are trying to escape with realistic economic reforms that end many of the entitlements they have been bestowed on the masses. The Obama Health Insurance plan might wind up as the door into which Americans enter the kind of welfare state that has so damaged once great and now nearly irrelevant Western Europe. Once inside, extricating from entitlement heaven is about as easy as weaning oneself from heroine.