The youth really are not to blame for being conditioned by their collectivist influences. They’ve been bombarded by teachers, movies, and television all promoting the idea that government knows best. If we all just put our faith and support behind a group of ‘enlightened’ government ‘experts’, a better life is just around the corner. But even in countries where the political left had total control over every aspect of its population, it still failed to achieve its allegedly noble goals.

The former Soviet Union is a perfect example of where socialist policies were implemented with the total power of the state, including the indoctrination of children beginning at a very young age. All the pieces were in place for the worker’s paradise and most people were raised to believed in it, yet it never materialized.

The danger of a totalitarian system is its tendency to become more brutal over time. When their leaders realize that ‘equality’ and ’social justice’ is not working out as planned, they end up implementing their policies more aggressively. Never do they question the underlying ideological assumptions, which would undermine the reason for their existence.

But even more benign versions of European socialism are plagued with mounting debt, unproductiveness, and corruption (not to mention severely restricted liberty). The erudite Victor D. Hanson clearly describes what socialism in Greece is like:

I once lived in Greece for over two years, and visit there every other summer. Any casual observer could have predicted its present fiscal meltdown, which is emblematic of big government socialism. Here is the creed of many of the E.U. socialist states.

1) Praise socialism in the abstract and demonize capitalism, especially the American model, as cruel and heartless.

2) Cheat in every way imaginable on your taxes. On any average day in Greece, a shopkeeper, repairman, or business person would offer a product or service for a 30% discount if paid in cash and kept off the books. Tax-dodging was a national pastime - and this from dyed-in-the-wool socialists. (e.g., we are back to the paradigm of this nation’s leading tax-enforcer and tax-lawmaker both being tax dodgers).

3) Connive for every imaginable state entitlement. In Greece, inventing a disability, fudging for an age subsidy, keeping a dead beneficiary on the books are likewise national pastimes. The notion that the E.U. had to send more monies southward than went back in taxes to Brussels made it all the better, as there was a sort of endemic “us/them” or Michelle Obama-like “raise the bar” mentality that something was “owed” to Greece anyway, so why not take advantage of richer European cousins? No honor among socialists?

4) Institutionalized lethargy. When one cannot be fired, then one immediately begins to plot to slow down, how to do the least imaginable work for the greatest pay. The beaches near Athens in the afternoon had plenty of government power, water, and phone panel-vans, as employees went out on a “service call” to the sea. Banks might have ten employees, five customers, and no one at the customer service windows. Again, the government electrician or mechanic would invariably proposition to come back later in the evening to do the work faster for cash without notification to his superiors.

Here are the apparent protocols of such big government socialism: no one believes in it; everyone seeks to cheat the system and others in it; no one wishes to criticize the system when it is easier to con it; the public pretension of humanitarianism encourages private selfishness - sort of like the noble French in 2003 going to the beach for their annual August vacation in scorching temperatures while the state was supposed to keep their aged parents, who died in the thousands, alive in non-air-conditioned flats.

“All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle, must work their own downfall, for by this unjust plan of remuneration they must of necessity eliminate the valuable members - who find their services reaped by the indigent - and retain only the improvident, unskilled, and vicious members.” - Robert Dale Owen