Submitted by Michael Snyder of The American Dream blog,

Becoming more like Europe is not a good thing.  But that is the path that we are currently on.  For the most part, Europeans live in a socialist “Big Brother” system in which the government completely dominates your life from the cradle to the grave.  Of course there are differences from country to country, but generally speaking the lives of most Europeans are very tightly regulated.  You see, the truth is that high levels of individual liberty and freedom are considered to be “dangerous” by the European elite.  They believe that if we are all allowed to just do whatever we want that it would result in utter chaos.  They are convinced that life is better when those that are smarter (them) control the lives of everyone else.

In essence, Europe is like a giant religious cult in many ways (minus the religion).  With each passing year, the number of rules and regulations governing the daily lives of Europeans steadily grows, as does the level of control.  If you try to live outside of that control, you could very well find yourself in a direct confrontation with the authorities very rapidly.

Just consider what is happening in Germany.  Authorities there have stated repeatedly that they do not believe in having any “parallel societies”, and therefore everyone must participate in the system that the government has established.

That includes all children.  In Germany today, almost all forms of homeschooling are illegal.  In fact, one judge shockingly ruled that one set of parents could not have custody of their children because they might move them to another country and homeschool them there…

A judge has issued a stunning verdict in a homeschooling case in Germany, ordering that the parents cannot have custody of their children because the family might move to another country and homeschool, posing a “concrete endangerment” to the children.

 

Dirk and Petra Wunderlich’s case made international headlines in August when 20 armed police arrived with a battering ram and forcibly took their four children from their home in Darmstadt, Germany, and enrolled them in public school.

 

As WND reported at the time, the children, ages 7 to 14, were taken into police custody. They were allowed to return home three weeks later when their father and mother, given no choice by the federal bureaucracy in Germany, agreed to allow their kids to attend public schools despite their objection to the social and religious instruction there.

Are you starting to see what I meant when I compared Europe to a cult?

In Europe, government is god, and everyone and everything belongs to the government.

Apparently, that even includes the life savings of their own citizens.  The following is from a Reuters article that was just posted this week…

The savings of the European Union’s 500 million citizens could be used to fund long-term investments to boost the economy and help plug the gap left by banks since the financial crisis, an EU document says.

Did you catch that?  The EU apparently believes that they could use the private savings of their own citizens “to fund long-term investments” any time that they want.

But what if you don’t want your life savings to be invested in that way?

Too bad for you.

In fact, according to that Reuters article the EU wants to find ways to “mobilize more personal pension savings” so that there will be a larger pool with which to potentially fund long-term projects…

The Commission will ask the bloc’s insurance watchdog in the second half of this year for advice on a possible draft law “to mobilize more personal pension savings for long-term financing”, the document said.

In Europe, they also tend to love any “Big Brother” technologies that will allow them to watch, track, monitor and record the activities of their citizens.

For example, it has been reported that in the UK there are 1.85 million video cameras watching the population, and London has been called “the most watched city in the world“.

The control freaks in the UK are so paranoid that it is even illegal to carry a knife in public, but despite all of their crazy laws the rate of violent crime in the UK is still far higher than it is in the United States.

Now, the UK has decided that all of the medical records for the entire population will be gathered into a single database.  The following is from a recent TechDirt article…

The UK government is currently building a database called care.data that will contain all of England’s medical records. It’s being promoted as providing valuable information for healthcare management and medical researchers that will lead to improved treatment.

But this database will not be private.  In fact, it is being reported that information from this database will be sold to drug companies and insurance companies…

Drug and insurance companies will from later this year be able to buy information on patients – including mental health conditions and diseases such as cancer, as well as smoking and drinking habits – once a single English database of medical data has been created.

 

Harvested from GP and hospital records, medical data covering the entire population will be uploaded to the repository controlled by a new arms-length NHS information centre, starting in March. Never before has the entire medical history of the nation been digitised and stored in one place.

How would you feel if that was being done to your private medical information?

Not that the U.S. is a bastion of freedom and liberty these days either.

For example, Infowars is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security plans to launch a “national license plate tracking system”…

The Department of Homeland Security is set to activate a national license plate tracking system that will be shared with law enforcement, allowing DHS officers to take photos of any license plate using their smartphone and upload it to a database which will include a “hot list” of “target vehicles”.

The details are included in a PDF attachment uploaded yesterday to the Federal Business Opportunities website under a solicitation entitled “National License Plate Recognition Database.”

The system will “track vehicle license plate numbers that pass through cameras or are voluntarily entered into the system from a variety of sources (access control systems, asset recovery specialists, etc.) and uploaded to share with law enforcement” in order to help locate “criminal aliens and absconders.”

And for many more ways that the U.S. is becoming a “Big Brother society”, please see my previous article entitled “32 Privacy Destroying Technologies That Are Systematically Transforming America Into A Giant Prison“.

Another way that America is becoming more like Europe is in the area of religious behavior.

At one time, Europe was a hotbed for religious faith.  Of course those days are long gone.  And the United States is now heading down the exact same path, although Europe is still way ahead of us.  The following is from a Pew Research surveyconducted a few years ago…

Half of Americans deem religion very important in their lives; fewer than a quarter in Spain (22%), Germany (21%), Britain (17%) and France (13%) share this view.

So why has religion become so unimportant?

Well, it is because that is what the government system tells them to believe from the time that they are little children.

As I mentioned earlier, the government dominates your life from the beginning to the end in Europe.  This even includes decisions about ending your life.

In fact, in Belgium they actually want to extend the euthanasia law to children…

Making the argument that everybody has the right to die, Karine Lalieux, a Socialist member of the Belgian House, is pushing legislation that would extend the country’s 2002 euthanasia law to minors under 18.

 

“Our responsibility is to allow everybody to live, but also to die, in dignity,’’ said Lalieux.

And in the Netherlands they actually have mobile euthanasia teams that go door to door helping elderly people end their lives in the comfort of their own homes.

Europe is not a model for the rest of us to follow.

Instead, Europe should serve as a stark warning to the rest of the world about what can happen when you let the control freaks get too much control.