Europe: the canary in the welfare-state coal mine

"If they do not carry out these austerity packages, these countries could virtually disappear in the way that we know them as democracies," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso reportedly said of Greece, Spain, Portugal in June 2010.

Since that time, the debt situation in each of those countries has only gotten worse. The first Greek bailout package, worth more than $110 billion, failed to calm Greece's creditors.

The tax hikes and spending cuts, forced on Greece by its rescuers, threw the country into a deep recession which only sent its debt-to-GDP ratio higher, from 143 percent in 2010 to 165 percent in 2011.

And then, just as Barraso predicted, Greece, in a very real sense, ceased to be a democracy. Prime Minister George Papandreou was forced to resign by unelected European commissioners after he suggested that Greek voters should be allowed to vote on the terms of the most recent European Union bailout package.

The European Commission then handpicked his replacement, former European Central Bank Vice President Lucas Papademos.

The coup by Europe's unelected bureaucrats was not limited to Greece. In Italy, where the government's debt-to-GDP ratio is 121 percent, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was also forced to resign.

He was replaced by European Commissioner and Goldman Sachs adviser Mario Monti, who had to be appointed "senator for life" before he assumed control of the country since he had never been elected to anything.

European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said of Italy at the time, "the country needs reforms, not elections."

But the experts' reforms are still failing to quell the continent's burgeoning debt crisis. The reality is that the European welfare-state model is broken. Italy and Greece are just its first national victims. ...

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