Wake Up, Critics: Here’s Obama’s Grand Plan

April 20, 2011



US President Barack Obama gestures

Economic factors create and change cultures. They transform the way individuals consider their contribution to society, they modify the relation between citizen and state, and they change the way individuals are able to control their own future. But there are limits. The European welfare state, as we know, had to retreat from its program of full control — not only because it is so expensive to maintain (an army can hardly be financed) but because the European welfare state’s defining “narrativeâ€