Austerity

The West is collapsing under the weight of 60 years of socialism. Greece, France and the UK have proposed austerity measures as debt soars and the generous social benefits cannot go on. The citizens respond with protests and riots. This doesn't bode well for the future.

The Western economies will not recover as wages stagnate, the global population grows and resources become more scarce. There simply is not enough oil, metals, food or wealth to sustain the world as we have known it. Westerners are not prepared to give up their lifestyles despite a world that changed forever. They will protest and riot and elect politicians who will lie and promise the status quo.

My grandparents and parents lived austere, modest lives shunning debt and living within their means. My generation lived well beyond their means on debt and still didn't have everything that they wanted. I blame television and the consumer economy for much of this shameful lifestyle of entitlement. But ultimately it is the moral failing of the individual people of the West that bought this nonsense.

The West will slide into the new Dark Age at alarming speed. There will be protests and riots and whining but it won't stop the inevitable decline. New repressive feudal lords will violently suppress dissent after a while and the West will settle in short, brutish and nasty lives like much of the world.