I think we are becoming aware of the dependant class in Europe through experience of rising welfare costs and most initiatives involve and element of coercion as in do this or we stop your money. We are also looking at getting the private secotr involved in back to work programmes and paying companies by results in terms of how many people they get back to work. The problem I believe is now one of proper effective administration rather than ideology. No one really believes that socialism will work the best sytem we have is the market economy with limited state intervention.
BTW If we had your gun laws our murder rate would probably be about the same as yours as in about 40x higher. Thats right 40 times as many people killed as now. It is a price I believe you or the majority of US citizens are willing to pay. If there was a referendum on adopting US style laws I think we would vote against and no one ever even brings it up as an issue. No problem as far as I am concerned I am all for domocracy.
Yarbles from what I read, you definitely need to get a handle on the dependent class and the connection between uneducated immigrants leaching off your systems. It is historically what brings down nations. Getting the private sector involved is great, but instead of actually paying them, give them tax breaks for employing those that were previously unemployed. Instead of just giving money back to them, you'd allow them to put it back into the economy and eliminate the middle man, ie. the government.
I don't know how gun control got into this, but I don't think our murder rate has anything to do with gun control. It has to do with people wanting something for nothing, and that whole class of dependents turning to crime as opposed to legitimate work. Whether Europeans want to have guns or not is really irrelevant. At this point, considering the mass inundation of Militant Islamic Immigrants into Europe, I'd think that the law abiing population being armed might be good for future safety.