Welfare State as Devil's Workshop

From a lengthy, but very interesting post about French Islam is the following snapshot of the effects of the welfare state on the young of a nation:

Thus France offers a fairly comfortable but a hopeless and enervated future to millions of its young, with no relief in sight. (Most of those do not have Muslim names, of course.) Many younger people don't even know what relief would look like. They have no vision of a prosperous society where those who want to work, do -- except in a mythical sense, through American movies (half of all tickets sold in France in an average year). It does not look like there can be a Steve Jobs in France. If one arises nevertheless, he will probably try to move to California, where entrepreneurship is still tolerated.

This observation Jacques Delacroix uses to support his analysis of jihadism in France. Although I differ with Delacroix in thinking that a religious culture serves as much more than a "fallback position in hard times," there is much to his analysis worth considering, as the above should indicate.

-- CAV