Prescient words from the Economist

I see this very clearly around me in the Netherlands.

"Even in the worst-hit countries, protests rarely come from the main victims of the economic crisis: the young, immigrants and temporary workers. Unemployment in Spain is close to 20%, but the loudest squeals have come from full-time workers arguing against raising the pension age to 67. Greek civil servants are mobilising to defend generous pensions that most of their countrymen will never enjoy. Other strikers include Greek tax collectors (whose bribe-taking is one reason why the country is broke) and taxi drivers furious over plans to make them issue receipts, keep accounts and pay taxes on their full incomes. Elsewhere, strikers have included French air-traffic controllers, said in a recent study by French state auditors to work fewer than 100 days a year—though nobody knows for sure, as their perks include shift patterns kept secret from senior management."

Europe's hypochondriacs