The European Paradise !

Now why can't we be more like Europe, a place where multiculturalism reigns supreme; the government know best and "average people" live happy, satsified lives without all of the trappings of upward mobility that we feckless Americans love to attain?

Hmmm...seems like nowadays, even the Europeans don't want to be...in Europe. The Brussels Journal clues us in:

In the first nine months of this year, almost 100,000 people left the Netherlands to settle elsewhere, 12,000 more than the same period last year.
About half of the emigrants were Dutch natives, the national statistics office CBS said on Friday.
If the trend continues, more than 130,000 people will have left the country by the end of this year.
For the third successive year, the number of emigrants substantially outnumbers immigrants, the CBS said.
The net effect means the Dutch population was reduced in the 2004-06 period by 75,000.

Despite the dramatic reversal, the number of immigrants is also on the increase...

In the first nine months of this year, 139,000 babies were born, a decrease of 3,000 compared with the same period in 2005.
If this trend continues, this year's birth rate will be under 185,000, the lowest number in two decades.

The article doesn't mention why so many native born Dutch are fleeing their homeland; but two reasons for this type of outflow are standard: Lower quality of life and/or personal prosecution. The EU's floundering economic model is well known (and wait until they start cutting back in order to appease the global warming gods); but what can Dutch nationals be so afraid of otherwise at home? I guess they could ask Theo van Gogh or Hirsi Ali.....

In Germany, more of the same, as we hear from the rabidly anti-American propoganda rag Der Spiegel:

Faced with poor job prospects, high taxes and an intrusive bureaucracy, more and more Germans are choosing to emigrate. Most of those who leave, though, are highly qualified -- which could mean devastating economic consequences.

They are tired of living in country where landing a job is like playing the lottery, a country where not even half of citizens live from gainful employment and a country in which even academics in their mid-40s are already considered problem cases when it comes to job placement. In other words, they are fed up with living in a country where all opportunities already seem to be taken: opportunities to succeed in one's career, to own property and to achieve prosperity.
That is why they want to leave -- as fast as they can, in fact -- and move to places where they believe there is hope for a better future.

Der Spiegel is too full of hate for America to admit that any of these German emigrees are leaving for the United States, but I'll bet my last Deustchmark that we are already seeing some of them here. A look at who's leaving is an indictment of the whole European social and economic model:

Not only are more people turning their backs on Germany, but those who go are typically the country's best and brightest...The percentage of emigrants with doctorates is 10 times as high as it is in the general population. And half of emigrants are younger than 35. "
Meanwhile, the number of new immigrants is on the decline, and those who do choose to make Germany their home are often not exactly the kinds of workers companies actively seek out...

I guess well-trained, professional Germans are being tired of told it is their duty to humanity to work in menial jobs in which a large portion of their heavilty-taxed salary goes to immigrants who seem unable (ahem! cough!) to work at all. But here's the kicker -which we also noted in Holland - that spells the death of the Continent:

The demographic crisis is getting worse, especially when one considers that deaths outnumbered births by 144,000 in 2005, and that this gap is continuing to widen.

The two stars, the two enlightened powerhouses of the New Europe, are now collapsing under a political theorem designed to dis-incentive work and to favor the views and rights of new citizens over a nation's exisiting population and value system. And while Europe slowly collapses (or in France's case, burns), the remaining minds left to it focus squarely on...global warming as the biggest threat to its existance. And any resistance to the ideas of the bureaucratic elite is regarded as nothing short of idiocy, blasmphemy, or something worse...and maybe that's why people are fleeing. Beacuse they've seen this type of thing happen before in Europe.

A final thought on this budding totalitarianism of the EU:

The era of the state church has been replaced by an age in which the state itself is the church. European progressives still don't get this: they think the idea of a religion telling you how to live your life is primitive, but the government regulating every aspect of it is somehow advanced and enlightened." - Mark Steyn

A life, with every aspect regulated, is the European social paradise we hear so much about? The same way Cuba is, and the Soviet Union was, I suppose...yet why have people always fled (over fences, through shark-infested waters, over walls) these leftist Valhallahs even at the risk of their very lives?

Same reason they're leaving now, I suppose...