- All I know is that God punishes all evil.
- Then how come he left Europe alone?

Overheard from an American sitcom.

Europe has always been obsessed with power. It used to exert that power by building huge empires and spreading Western culture around the world. When it suffered cycles of cultural exhaustion, namely going through a series of democratic revolutions, it began to turn that force inward against itself. The result became the modern welfare state.

The European welfare model thrives on the excessive capital Europe has accumulated over time. The power it conveys, which may not be as flashy as the American overseas power, is strong but tricky, because most of it is spent guarding and babysitting its own citizens. Authorities and bureaucracies love to exert power, so when there's not a war going on, they begin using it against their own people to stay in control. And citizens learn to embrace it, because it spells safety to them.

What's worrying about the last health care bill just passed in America, is not the supposed socialism involved. Obamacare is still so extreme to the Right that no European government would ever be able to pass it through an election. What's worrying is that the European power language has begun shooting sparks around American voters. Americans are beginning to equate welfare with safety. It's the same language European leaders use to continue expand their governmental power in every direction, from religion, sex, food, lifestyle and environment, to sports, gambling, private finance, alcohol...you name it.

Brett Stevens fills in:

With Obamacare, we see our society fragment in two: those who want paternalism, and those who want natural selection. The natural selection types are the confident ones who want a meritocratic system of success, a community which filters out threats like pedophiles and criminals so they can safely raise kids, and to be away from the hive-mind. The paternalistic types want government to guarantee them protection on their streets populated with threats, want a safety net in case they don’t succeed, and want to be in the hive-mind so other people can affirm that they’re smart or worthy.

This split will never be reconciled. The first group, who tend toward the right, are the civilizations builders. They make successful places from nothing. The second group are the parasites and the predators who make huge profits by manipulating them, and they come after a civilization has been successful and help leech away its wealth and intelligence. It’s no different than how, in a forest, if you lie down in the open you will soon be consumed by blood-sucking parasites of all types. This is how nature exerts an equal and opposite reaction on anything that wishes to survive. In the case of our society, this equal and opposite reaction threatens to sink us.

This polarization between Right and Left means America's long-standing values and virtues are now undergoing European scrutiny, which they never really have been forced to do. It's therefore crucial to understand the history of Europe and the modern problems it faces to know what America will face in a few decades if it decides to continue down the Obamarama road.

Modern European problems, which threaten to kill most of Western civilization as we know it, include fatally low birth rates, ethnic and cultural riots, exploding suburbs, unemployment, a gigantic and ever-growing public sector, Islamic terrorism, health problems and lack of real political choice. Combined, these problems have the possibility of reconstructing a new Yugoslavia, or a post-Soviet redux scenario. In any case, it spells self-destruction, unless a new system is embraced.

Obama's health care bill is in many ways moderate, knowing the Democrats will still face Republican backlash during next election over this issue, but it's clear about its general direction. It points to Europe. And Europe points to disaster:

The Journal informed us that once Obamacare passed, three big changes would materialize within six months:

• Insurers wouldn't be allowed to cancel policies just because a person became sick or to place lifetime caps on care.
• New insurance plans would have to pay full cost of certain preventive care and exempt such care from deductibles.
• Children could stay on their parents' insurance policies until their 26th birthday.

The last may help the insurance companies since young people are generally healthier -- except that people probably won't sign up until their children get sick. The first two items, however, are a recipe for insurance company disaster. The first will encourage people to wait until they're sick before buying insurance. The second will encourage extraordinary overuse. No longer do you have to be sick to visit the doctor. You can just go for "preventive" reasons. Preventive care increases overall costs in the system. Once in awhile an individual may catch a disease in an early stage, but hundred others will be checked with no impact. Preventative services are not that costly and would be best paid for by individuals. Universal preventive care will send insurance company costs soaring.

So will the companies will be allowed to raise their rates? Not a chance. While one foot of Obamacare is on the gas pedal, the other is on the brake, putting federal price controls on insurance company premiums. The results will be insurance company bankruptcies. At that point we'll have to have a "public option." There will be no one left selling health insurance.

Some will ask why Europe "works." The answer to that question begs for a clarification of what the question means. The real question should be: How does the European model work? And the answer to that question is through high taxation, an aggressive and overtly protective welfare government that continues to grow in every branch, people losing their belief in independence, and cultures slowly dying away while being replaced by commercialism and government-sponsored activities. It's like living in a day care center, only this is all the youth you've got to spend.

In the health care sector, no one really knows how to stop the growing spending in Europe. What everyone knows is that quality suffers when we enter a recession. That means longer waiting queues (you normally wait a few hours to meet a doctor at the emergency anyway), fewer experts, more traveling between hospitals, faster and less concentrated examinations (in Europe, doctors often send you home with a bottle of pills, because otherwise you'll end up costing too much) and, of course, the fat pigs getting rich. In America, health insurance companies thrive. In Europe, bureaucrats thrive, mostly for just managing another bureaucrat.

European history repeats itself. It's abusing power again, but not anymore against colonies abroad, but against people at home. It's shuffling power and money around like toys in a huge system no one really is able to manage properly anymore. It's too big and too ineffective. According to the European Central Bank, Sweden, embraced and hailed by misled socialist fanatics and Obama fans, has got the world's most ineffeciant public sector. According to same study, the American public sector is the world's most efficient. Can you dig that? Europe is economic disaster. People who call Obamacare Communist are morons, but people who praise it are probably the biggest losers of our time.