Could the Marshall Plan really have hurt Europe, causing the problems of today?

(This was written by me in May of 2010, and it still holds true...)

 One day a while back I got to talking with one of my customers. His name is Tom he is Greek and he owns a restaurant in Lancaster, PA. He is 74 (i think) and works every day, usually in a dress shirt and tie even though I see him in the kitchen getting the food started or cutting meat. 

I asked him, why is it he still works hard every day, but if he lived in Greece he would have retired at 54 and got 90% pension. Well...it was like I poked him with a stick. For the next 20 minutes he gave me a really interesting lecture that well I never though of before. Between the wars there was a great migration of what he called the "Entrepreneur and Working Class" out of Western Europe. Most of them went to the US, Canada, Argentina, and Australia. After the Second World War the Marshall Plan went into effect to help Europe recover from the devastation of the war, and to prevent Communism from taking over the west. But instead of being a building block to rebuild Europe, it became a hand out. The Entrepreneur Class was gone and there was nothing to fill the void except government. This was the birth of the Nanny State across Europe. The governments took over what private industry should have done. To keep the people happy they just gave away what they could, with birthrates on the rise they knew the next generation would be able to foot the bill. The people got used to getting a lot of somethings for a little nothings, there was also some guilt from the older generations to make sure the younger generations do not have to suffer as they did. So the more Uncle Sam gave the more they took and gave away. In essence because they (Europe/Greece) did not have the do or die mentality because that class was gone and they did not really have the need since Uncle Sam was holding the safety net they created entire nations of folks who thought they were entitled to XYZ because they suffered through the wars. They of course gave birth to kids who wanted even more, like free universal health care, free collage education, retirement at 54, 6 to 8 week vacation, 52-100 weeks of PAID maternity leave, and the list goes on. Eventually reaching the point were their is no incentive to work because the government will take care of all your needs. Well eventually it all comes crashing down. The support (taxed) population decreases to a point were the cash is not there for the programs the people feel they are entitled to...and well BOOM! He believes that if Europe would have been allowed to recover on its own with little or limited US backing that it would have been stronger in the long run, because you would not have had the explosion of the entitlement class, and you would have had developed a new entrepreneur class to replace the one that left between the wars. Is he right? Well he sure made a good argument. And he had a butcher knife in his hand the entire time to I was not going to challenge him. But I think he hit on something that most never thought of.