Free Will

The paragraph of the day comes courtesy of George Will: Europe's Lack of Discipline

The EU has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings, a president no one can name, a parliament (in Strasbourg) no one other than its members wants to have power (which must subtract from the powers of national legislatures), a capital (Brussels) of coagulated bureaucracy no one admires or controls, a currency that presupposes what neither does nor should nor soon will exist (a European central government), and rules of fiscal behavior that no member has been penalized for ignoring. The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction -- that "Europe" has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.

Will has been absolutely on fire the last few months. The repeated crises in Big Government and concurrent reckless expansion of the welfare state are really the windmills that Will has been tilting against for most of his career, but it was a message no one wanted to hear in the preceding decade with its focus on social issues, terrorism, and foreign adventurism. Now, Will is back to the theme with which he made his career back in the Seventies: that the welfare state and the ambitious politicians who would administer it are dangerous to prosperity and inimical to individual freedom.