Your anecdotes are appreciated, but I'm talking a somewhat larger field of view. Again, on that level, the conclusions are obvious.

If we stick to anecdotes, my ancestors, like yours and many others, left their home country for the U.S. In many cases, it was because the governments of their home countries were too damn oppressive. What did they know that you've forgotten?

^Since 1944 (much earlier, actually), the capitalist world has progressed from a near laissez-faire condition to what you like to describe as European-style neoliberal socialism. The result everywhere has been an explosion in prosperity and civil rights, as well as in the collective political philosophy and social expectations of the citizenry. Even in the major democratic state that has most resisted these trends, the USA, life is simply much better today than it was half a century ago. I don't just mean we have better gadgets or more wealth, I think as a whole, people are more compassionate than they were then. And in every social, economic, cultural and political area where I have personally experienced that progress Conservatives have tirelessly and feverishly worked to obstruct it.^

I understand you have to believe this. And by taking it out of the realm of objective markers, (economic prosperity, political freedom, comparing one nation to another, etc.) you can leave this thesis hanging in midair, as so many liberal ideas do.

How do you measure "compassion" levels? Come to that, how do you construct any possible connection between increased state power and how "compassionate" Americans are? What conclusions would you draw if you charted state power with individual compassion levels around the world? Or are we laboring under the new collectivist definition of "compassion:" Money stripped from Americans and "compassionately" distributed to targeted voting groups?

Of course life is better today, and despite the preaching of the "progressives," the government had little to do with it. The civil rights movement, the ace usually played at this point in the discussion, preceded major Federal action in this area by over fifty years. Not all compassion flows from the State. And for the record, it wasn't secular leftists doing the heavy lifting back then.

"Neoliberal socialism." My goodness, there are a lot of euphemisms for statism. The foundation of this idea, Europe, is economically collapsing on several fronts as I write this. Britain is thanking God they didn't go over to the Euro. For sixty years Europe has been essentially living in a room over America's garage, which gave them a lot of margin. That's going away.

Question for the day: If America becomes Europe, who's going to be America?