“America and Greece are at different stops on the same one-way street, all too familiar to us immigrants. There's nothing new about Obama: been there, done that. Nothing could be less hopeful, or less of a change. He's the land where we grew up, with its union bullies and marginal tax rates and government automobiles and general air of decay all re-emerging Brigadoon-like from the mists entirely unspoilt by progress. it's like docking at Ellis Island in 1883, coming down the gangplank, and finding everyone excited about this pilot program they've introduced called "serfdom".”

“I'm an immigrant to this great land. For fellows like me, this is where the bus terminates. There's nowhere else to go. Everywhere else tried this, and it's killed them. There's nothing new about Obama-era "hope" and "change." For some of us, it's the land where we grew up: government hospitals, government automobiles, been there, done that. This isn't a bright new future, it's a straight-to-video disco-zombie sequel: the creature rises from the grave to stagger around in rotting bell-bottoms and cheesecloth shirt terrorizing a new generation. Burn, baby, burn. It's a Seventies-statist disco-era inferno.”

“Our new elite have more refined sensibilities than the old aristocracy: just as dowager duchesses would sniff that so-and-so was "in trade", so today's rulers have an antipathy to doers in general. How could Sarah Palin's executive experience running a state, a town, and a commercial fishing operation compare to all that experience Barack Obama had in sitting around thinking great thoughts? In forming his war cabinet, Winston Churchill said that he didn't want to fill it up with "mere advisors at large with nothing to do but think and talk." But Obama sent the Oval Office bust of Sir Winston back to the British, and now we have a government by men who've done nothing but "think and talk". There was less private-sector business experience in Obama's cabinet than in any administration going back a century.”

“In the Sixties, the hippies used to say, "Never trust anyone over 30." Now all the Sixties hippies are in their sixties, and they've gone quiet about that, but it's good advice for you: never trust anyone over 30 with the societal checkbook. You thought you were the idealistic youth of the Obama era, but in fact you're the designated fall-guys. You weren't voting for "the future," but to deny yourself the very possibility of one--like turkeys volunteering to waddle around with an "Audacity of Thanksgiving" bumper sticker on your tush. Instead of swaying glassy-eyed behind President Obama at his campaign rallies singing "We are the hopeychange," you should have been demanding that the government spend less money on small agencies with fewer employees on smaller salaries. Because if you don't, there won't be a future. "You can be anything you want to be"--but only if you first tell today's big spenders that, whatever they want to be, they should try doing it on their own dime.”

“Much of America is now in need of an equivalent of Mrs. Thatcher's privatization program in 1980s Britain, or post-Soviet Eastern Europe's economic liberalization in the early Nineties. It's hard to close down government bodies, but it should be possible to sell them off. And a side benefit to outsourcing the Bureau of Government Agencies and the Agency of Government Bureaus is that you'd also be privatizing public-sector unions, which are the biggest and most direct assault on freedom, civic integrity, and fiscal solvency.”

“Somewhere along the way these countries [EU] redefined the relationship between government and citizen into something closer to pusher and addict. And, once you've done that, it's very hard to persuade the addict to cut back his habit. Thus, the general acceptance everywhere but America is that the state should run your health care. A citizen of an advanced democracy expects to be able to choose from dozens of breakfast cereals, hundreds of movies at the video store, and millions of porno sites on the Internet, but when it comes to life-or-death decisions about his own body he's happy to have the choice taken out of his hands and given to the government.”

“The continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one. In those seventeen European countries that have fallen into the "lowest-low fertility," where are the children? In a way, you're looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk cafe listening to his iPod, the eternal adolescent charges of the paternalistic state. The government makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection...the long-term cost of welfare is the infantilization of the population. The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to have total choice over their satellite TV package, yet think it perfectly normal to allow the state to make all the choices in respect of their health care. It's a curious inversion of citizenship to demand control over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government. And it's hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latter-day Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.”