These riots in London have taken on a socio-economic bent, pinning the achievers in Great Britain against the moochers.  The more we hear from these people who are rioting, the more we realize that many are using this as an excuse to act out and show those evil rich people that “we can do what we want.”  Yeah, those evil rich people .. it’s all their fault that our government benefits are being cut!  This is our way of showing that “we’re redistributing the wealth.”  Interesting that they would blame the rich people for their benefits being cut, because without the taxes paid by rich people, there wouldn’t be any money for their precious government benefits.

Usually in this case, I would ask one simple question of these moochers who are blaming their problems on rich people:  If, by chance, you were to decide to become employed, would you go try to get a job from a poor person?  But we have this “if you were to decide to become employed” problem here.  The argument can be made that Great Britain has become such a cesspool of welfare moochers that its citizens are no longer concerned with actually earning a living.  They are owed a living by the government.    These rioters are acting with little concern as to how their actions affect their fellow citizens who are trying to make it: the bus boys at the restaurants that they are vandalizing, the cashiers at the groceries they are stealing from, the local business owners whose livelihoods they are sending up in smoke.  These people are trying to earn a living and are currently unable to do so because of the selfish and criminal actions of these rioting moochers.  This is what happens when a society becomes reliant on a government for its survival … take a look at this insight from Brendan O’Neill on the welfare state of Great Britain:

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are shattering their own communities represent a generation that has been suckled by the state more than any generation before it. They live in urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state during 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 urban, less well-off people's existences, from their financial wellbeing to their child-rearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain "mentally fit", has undermined individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The antisocial youthful rioters are the end-product of this antisocial system of state intervention.

There’s a lot more that I would recommend reading in O’Neill’s column: London’s burning: a mob made by the welfare state.  Considering what you just read about the prog’s concept of the American Dream, is a government-dependent society really what you envision for your children and your grandchildren?  As Thomas Sowell says in his latest collection of random thoughts: “Today, the welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjdhEvosC3I