From serious to delirious...

The thing about having an advanced society is that in order to maintain this, we must educate every new generation. If people's minds went blank, tomorrow we would effectively be in the stone ages. So in making decisions in this day and age, we need to educate ourself on the history of the subject we're deciding on, the current theories about it, and of course all information on how to actually succeed in that subject. For example, when you are going to be an architecht, you need to know how to design things, and the history of designing things to understand where people have gone wrong in the past and what to expect in the future. Every architecht learns the tale of that one bridge that collapsed because the builder didn't have resonance in mind. The same goes with politics and foreign policy. It is amazing to me that no one understands what "war" means. When going in to war, just like an architect, people need to understand where people have gone wrong in the past, and what to expect in the future. People have no sense of perspective of what is going to happen.
Did World War 2 teach Europe that appeasement doesn't work? The answer is no. They still believe violence only begets more violence and is never the answer. My very liberal history teacher even pointed out in class that had France and Britain invaded Germany when Hitler violated his treaty, that the war would never have escalated the way it did. When faced with the question of getting rid of a dictator who was refusing full cooperation with his treaty, Europe decided to stick with the appeasement attitude. They even appeased him with oil-for-food which turned out to be more like money-for-Saddam.
By force is just a shitty way to run a government. I don't believe we have seen anything close to a theocracy, but let the religious right be warned: In the past enforcing state religion has only meant that people hate the religion and the state. The reason we are such a religious country today is because of the separation of church and state. In Europe they despise religion, because of the resentment they hold for it for hundreds of years of theocratic rule. In Europe, they now have thoughtcrime laws. The government tells you who you can hate. Well-intentioned as it might be, this is how authoritariansim creeps in. It starts by telling you what mode of thinking you have to possess by law. Europe, the birthplace of Fascism and Communism, still hasn't learned these lessons and they continue to say that it is only against "intolerance" and that it is good legislation. Well we'll see...
Forcing people to do things just makes them hate whoever is forcing them, even if it is a noble cause. Soviet Russia should have taught us this. Blah blah, it wasn't real Marxist Communism, go shit on yourselves. Anyways, the thought crime legislation in Europe and the forced wealth distribution just doesn't work.
Socialist German, French, and English cars lag behind even the United States in quality. And thanks to Auto Unions, we get smoked by Japan (mostly, Subaru blows, GM does pretty well actually). Notice when Germans took over Chrysler, their cars are now more expensive (but prettier, yay!) but their quality is poopier. The EU is not as burgeoning as an economy as they say it is. For one, they are putting on more and more tariffs on others goods, (especially America's), and for two, their wealth distribution is going to bite them in the ass in 30 years. The birth rates of all the prominent EU countries are below the stagnation rate of 2.1, and it is projected that so many of their citizens will be of non-working age, that it will be almost impossible for the workers to support them. Same goes with our country. Avg. EU employment is around 9% right now. We have a "crisis" at 5.5%.
Here are some good thoughts from some institute on why socialism sucks.

The conflict between [the principle of capitalism and socialism is] irreconcilable and does not allow of any compromise. Control is indivisible. Either the consumers' demand as manifested on the market decides for what purposes and how the factors of production should be employed or the government takes care of these matters. There is nothing that could mitigate the opposition between these two contradictory principles. They preclude each other.

If everyone just took care of themselves, then things like this wouldn't be a problem. But when people are given the choice between having to do everything by themselves and collecting other people's money, they vote democrat. If the democrats didn't have to be such anti-America cynical shitheads, the South would have never left them, and the whole country would vote themselves in to socialism.
We are only at the beginning of this "comfy" capitalism now, but it will fail in 5o years. It will especially fail because Japan, China, and the Koreas are so dedicated to production and a funny form of group capitalism, that they will crush their Western counterparts.
Europe and Canada's only hope is to keep competition at bay by slowing down their competitor's production. What is a good way to do this? Well invent a theory that says when they produce so much and so efficiently, they are killing the planet and themselves. Good idea! That way their crappy overpriced goods can compete with a country who's factories are "environmentally safe". But the thing is, since everyone will not be of working age, or will be taxed so heavily, who is going to buy such overpriced crap? The answer is no one! Yay, then we'll all learn a lesson that free market capitalism is the best system, just like we learned it 200 years ago. Hopefully, future generations who go through the 2nd coming of free market capitalism will get collective "burnout" and decide the people who get wealthy on it should give their money away to everyone else because it just wasn't fair. Hopefully by then, history books will talk only about imperialism and past misdeeds, and other apologies, and focus less on what went right. That way people will forget about what went right, and they will just make the same mistakes again. By erasing these parts of history, it is like forgetting about it, and for social policy it is the equivalent of not teaching anybody math or science anymore.
What is the solution to this never-ending policy circle? Robots. Hopefully by then, we have the technology to have robots do everything while we just reap the benefits. Everyone will be alotted certain amount of money and robots will control production. When you pay your money to the robot company, they will just give it to the state, then give it back to you. And production will never decrease, because they are robots and they work for free. We don't want to make them too humanlike though, or we'll get an organization like People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots, which will fuck up our whole system. We'll say to PETR, hey, did you know that robots aren't self-aware? They will say, but they can sense things. Great, senses without consciousness! That means we should treat them as good as we treat humans! Then the robots will have a bunch of special protections and we'll go back to the cycle, only this time we'll have a whole bunch of soulless objects to take care of too. See? This post is irrefutable proof of the horrors of force. When force is all that people understand, then we regress as a species. Wolves are this way and so are prides of Lions.