O Brave New World That Has Such People In It

Robert Fulford thinks the British rioters are "the spiritual descendants of Oliver Twist." Well, yes. But the Victoriana fails to capture how we got from there to here. The smash 'n' grabbers are the end result of decades of well-intentioned social tinkering and malevolent Gramscianism. They are the spawn of the social welfare state; hooded homunculi, devoid of character and conscience, who will take what they can, when they can, because they can.

Look upon your work, ye mighty social change junkies, and despair.

Update: David Warren writes:

To my mind, the basic attitudes of the underclass - a hardened, live-fortoday atheism; unconcealed envy and greed; inability to care about the consequences of one's actions; indifference to any kind of social taboo - had tinctured the whole society. Those who flaunted their wealth, and those who intended to loot it, were united in a new kind of social compact, based on the purest materialism.

"Free markets" can remove obstacles to the accumulation of wealth. But they cannot replace the glue that holds a society together, after it has been dissolved in the bureaucratic acids of that Nanny State.