From FT comments (via Nick, 30):
Le Gun:
"The politicians are the symptom, it's the entitled voters that are the disease. They expect a nice life paid for any someone else because they either don't want to work in the available jobs or build a business or don't have the grit and discipline to gain the abilities to do so. Their answer is to hand the whole thing over the politicians to deal with on their behalf which the pols have duly delivered, effectively by liquidating the national equity build up over decades after WW2 to do so. Not much different in the UK.
Nature has a very clear way of dealing with such individuals or indeed entire societies because the laws of thermodynamics don't stop at your borders or even own front door. If you want a nice life every day you have to go out and fight nature to earn it because she gives us nothing for free. Every day you have to work with others to build or do something useful, every day you have to invest at real risk some of the surplus you produce for the future, every day you have to, even late in your career, do the job a bit better, learn a new skill as technology changes. Most importantly you have to determine that you want to create a life for yourself on your terms so you don't have to ask the state to thieve from someone else to pay for what you yourself have not earned. And you have to do it without resorting to becoming thieving smasher because you won't want to live in a society where we all play that game.
Everyone thinks the politicians can fix this. 5 minutes with any senior pol in power will completely disabuse you of such hallucinations. Good societies are build from the ground up actions of millions of peoples working together in a myriad of ways to meet each others needs, but the fundamental building block is a well intentioned individual with some set of values that means they can function with others as a part of the whole.
You can decide whether or not France and many other European countries have that most fundamental quality still in them."
