"Totally Free!" Stop "Helping" us, please!

Obamacare calling Obamacare Obamacare:
On the streets of Miami,
Big Government goes trawling for more dependents.

Nothing from government is free. It always costs you time, money and freedom! m/r

Beyond Europe :: SteynOnline

by Mark Steyn  •  Mar 18, 2014

On Saturday, I spoke to the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference in Nashua, New Hampshire. I was one of the last of a bazillion speakers over two days, many of whom - Bobby Jindal, for example - had pointed out how serious things are by offering some variant of the warning that, if we're not careful, we'll wind up like Europe.

So I tried to explain that, by most measures, America is already way beyond Europe, and significantly worse than other English-speaking nations in the New World (Canada, Australia, New Zealand). From the OECD's 2011 edition of Government At A Glance, government expenditures per person:

New Zealand $12,252
Australia $13,819
Spain $14,771
Canada $16,655
Italy $16,811
Germany $17,263
United Kingdom $18,155
France $18,866
United States $19,266

America is not who it thinks it is. John Hawkins has an excellent post today on the five structural problems that are destroying the nation, and he marshals some evidence of his own:

America doesn't have the highest taxes in the Western world, but it does have the most progressive tax system in the Western world. As a practical matter, what this means is that we have large numbers of Americans voting on whether others should pay more taxes in order to give them things.

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