From Mark Steyn’s great new book, After America:
[T]he self extinction of Europe is not just a matter of economics. Advanced social democracies don’t need a value added tax; they need a value added life…Europe’s economic crisis is a mere symptom of its economic crisis: What is life for? What gives it meaning? Post-Christian, post nationalist, post modern Europe has no answer to that question, and so it has 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees, and wonders why the small band of workers in between them can’t make the math add up. Yet it’s not about the arithmetic, but about instilling in people for whom life is a diversion a sense of purpose larger than themselves: What’s it all about, Alfie? Cradle-grave nanny state “protection”?