It had to happen sooner or later. Mark Steyn writes what may be his greatest column ever on (of course) the way Wealth has made us Stupid.

Of course the very idea of the greatest ever Steyn column needs some thought. The funniest? The most scathing? The most thought-provoking?

The one where Monica Lewinsky’s dress is interviewed in 2018? Or this one from 2001 about the Eurozone which reads rather well:

There is no need for a single currency, and several compelling reasons why it’s a crummy idea, not least the insufficient labour mobility in Europe and the way the budgetary limits will complicate the already looming crunch over demographically unsustainable social programmes. Set against those considerations, the case for the euro was laughable in its feebleness. You don’t need to scrap a dozen currencies to eliminate "transaction costs". That’s like curing a cold by amputating your nose…

Because Texans, Vermonters and Georgians all agree that they’re Americans, they’re happy to go their own way in matters of capital punishment, income tax, gay civil unions: that’s a dynamic, creative federalism.

Because Greeks, Scots and Austrians still regard each other as foreign, a European identity has to be imposed from the top down, as if by harmonising tax codes and passport design you can harmonise a bunch of foreigners into one nationality, regulate a European consciousness into being: that’s not federalism, but a fetid, stagnant over-centralisation.

Still, this latest effort is up there with the best. It looks at the central issue of our times – how wealth has made us more and more stupid:

In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents. What to do about such people? Ignore the problem? Attempt to fix it?

The former nags at the liberal guilt complex, while the latter is way too much like hard work: the modern progressive has no urge to emulate those Victorian social reformers who tramped the streets of English provincial cities looking for fallen women to rescue. All he wants to do is ensure that the fallen women don’t fall anywhere near him.

So the easiest “solution” to the problem is to throw public money at it. You know how it is when you’re at the mall and someone rattles a collection box under your nose and you’re not sure where it’s going but it’s probably for Darfur or Rwanda or Hoogivsastan. Whatever. You’re dropping a buck or two in the tin for the privilege of not having to think about it…

The modern welfare state operates on the same principle: since the Second World War, the hard-working middle classes have transferred historically unprecedented amounts of money to the unproductive sector in order not to have to think about it. But so what? We were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid.

That works for a while. In the economic expansion of the late 20th century, citizens of Western democracies paid more in taxes but lived better than their parents and grandparents. They weren’t exactly rich, but they got richer.

They also got more stupid. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want.” Sir William and his colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic succeeded beyond their wildest dreams: to be “poor” in the 21st-century West is not to be hungry and emaciated but to be obese, with your kids suffering from childhood diabetes.

… In one-sixth of British households, not a single family member works. They are not so much without employment as without need of it. At a certain level, your hard-working bourgeois understands that the bulk of his contribution to the treasury is entirely wasted.

It’s one of the basic rules of life: if you reward bad behaviour, you get more of it. But, in good and good-ish times, who cares?

Western Europe is in the unhappy position of a group of sullen teenagers who have wrecked the place after a massive drunken vainglorious binge.

They know that they have to spend a lot of the immediate future clearing up the mess, when they could have been off doing something interesting had they not been just so … so stupid.

And as they listlessly wander through the wreckage nursing a splitting headache trying to summon the energy to start to tidy up, they look around to find someone to blame. Anyone but themselves.

And, to make things worse, there’s no-one there.

Other than up the road where some tough-looking Asian businessmen are wondering about buying the trashed property, and putting its silly occupants on starvation rations for a few centuries – to teach them a lesson in self-discipline.