London’s Burning: a Mob Made by the Welfare State

Coming to a US city near you

NOTE: I linked this story in a comment on this post, but wanted to promote it to the front page and a post of its own as well

Brendan O’Neil at Spiked has a great column as to the real cause of the violence and lawlessness that has plagued London this week, but it applies to what is happening here in the states too:

London’s burning: a mob made by the welfare state

Yes, there’s a ‘political context’ to the riots: it is that British youth have been so suckled by the state they have zero sense of community spirit.

The political context is not the cuts agenda or racist policing – it is the welfare state, which, it is now clear, has nurtured a new generation that has absolutely no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are ‘rising up’ – actually they are simply shattering their own communities – represent a generation that has been more suckled by the state than any generation before it. They live in those urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state over the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of less well-off urban people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their childrearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain ‘mentally fit’, has helped to undermine such things as individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The anti-social youthful rioters look to me like the end product of such an anti-social system of state intervention.

We have the same problem here in the US. Generation-after-generation of communities and cultures that have lived almost entirely off handouts and entitlements from the state and federal governments. People who have never worked, will never work. People who feel entitled to their entitlements, because the Democrat party and the Liberal Main Stream Media (but I repeat myself) have told them they are entitled to the hard work and labor of others, and that the government can and will take care of them (if only they continue to vote for Democrats, who perpetuate the welfare state).

And what we’re seeing in London right now? It’s coming to America, too. Our current levels of entitlement and welfare spending is unsustainable. And more-and-more tax paying citizens are getting fed up with being robbed by the government to support an ever-increasing unproductive dependent class. And when these entitlements end, as they should and must — the day the EBT cards stop coming in the mail and the housing subsidies and welfare checks stop — we will see mostly-black mobs begin rioting, looting, and burning in American cities, too. Cities like Atlanta, Cleveland, Columbus, Philadelphia, and Baltimore will become war zones.

Sounds like paranoid hyperbole? Perhaps. But what do you think will happen when we cut welfare to millions of black Americans who have never been responsible for their own welfare?