In the case of the USA I would recommend the essay by Henry Giroux titled In the Twilight of the Social State. It is featured on numerous blogs.

Some of our union State Labour parties have demonstrated that we are degenerating into corruption like many other third world countries. Many African nations are rich in minerals but most are kept in abject poverty by corrupt African rulers. No one cares because the leaders are not white. Our turning away from the Christian heritage that made us so prosperous will and is our undoing.

A compendious apercu Dr C. I enjoyed reading your article

We all appear sitting in the same class room here. Democratic directions of the West are glaring in their obvious retrograde flight from social responsibility on a trajectory of “Economic Darwinism” tagged Neo-Liberal.

1. The welfare states are financially unsustainable and are on a collision course with reality. Their social security schemes are not "insurance", there is no fiduciary prudence, you have no "account", no moneys held in trust. If any private corporation practised such schemes on such representations by such accounting practices, the directors would be in prison for a very long time. Governments have simply taken the money from one group of people and spent it on another, without any way of performing the financial promises it has made to the millions of people whom it deprived of the means to provide for their own retirement. The USA, for example, is over $61 trillion in the red, most of which is unfunded social security (so-called) and medicare liabilities.

2. Seeing that they were spending more than they were taking in taxes, the welfare states turned to sophisticated versions of printing money. Their cheer-leaders the Keynesian high priests sang government-funded hymns that governments can magically create wealth for all by printing money. They can't, and it doesn’t matter who says we can. The scarcity of resources is imposed on man by nature. It is not a question of the correct "ideology". If it were, there would be no need for anyone to work. We would live in a cornucopia, a Land of Cockaigne. This infantile narcisissm is the essence of Keynesian, social democratic and statist economic theory - that we can get something for nothing by getting armed men to decree “Let it be so”. We can’t. All the redistributionist schemes are just cheating and theft by another name.

3. After WWII, the USA was able to shoe-horn the other nations into accepting the USD as the reserve currency of the world. This enabled the USA to vacuum wealth out of all the other nations of the world just by printing more money.

4. But that situation cannot last. Its creditors won’t continue to accept USD in return for real goods since the Yanks have started inflating in earnest.

(cont.) No other fiat currency is in a position to replace the USD. The only thing that can do that is gold or other precious metals.

Of course the inflationists: the good-time-guys and the born-to-rule elite (social democrat and conservative chapters) regard this as absolutely terrible. But gold is the little guys’ way of fighting back against Leviathan. It’s society’s age-old defence against the state.

5. Printing money not only *doesn’t* create wealth. It creates chronic intractable economic, social and moral problems. It creates the roller-coaster cycle of spiv boom and depressing crises. It disadvantages the poor most of all, creating millions of dependants. It creates crony capitalism, the corporatist state. It funds aggressive wars. Since money intermediates most exchanges and therefore social co-operation, perpetual inflation replaces the social values of responsibility, savings, work, and enterprise, with the statist vices of entitlement, instant grat, debt, claims of victimhood, and political parasitism.

6. The coming crisis in worldwide monetary policy has implications not just for monetary policy, but for the very idea of big government that the western states have inherited from the 20th century – the heyday of socialist experimentation.

7. I laugh when I see the cluelessness of socialists saying how “we” need to raise living standards by more taxes and entitlement schemes, or fretting that more freedom causes poverty. Dreaming of making the problem go away by more government grab-and-spend is just more of the “gimme-gimme-gimme” mentality, more of the idea that the poor Chinese, or poor Indians, or someone, owes us a living. They don’t.

Cry-babies who assume there *must* be titty out there somewhere, thinking the problem is one of “ideology”, and crying “neo-liberal” when they don’t get what they want, need to wake up and grow up. The emperor has no clothes. Far from being socially just, the entitlement/forced-redistribution mentality is anti-social and unjust. It is financially bankrupt *because* it is intellectually and morally bankrupt. The choice is between sound money, much less government and much more individual freedom and responsibility sooner, or much greater social destruction, injustice and social chaos not much later.

http://mises.org/