The New Road to Serfdom (11 page)

Once all states were allowed to develop their own approaches, some naturally went further. Perhaps the most successful was Florida, which did not merely tweak the former system, but introduced an entirely new social contract for the poor. While the Florida reform reflected major American trends in welfare reform (including time limits on benefits and work requirements), its major contribution to welfare policy was its emphasis on local control and local accountability.

Florida legislators understood that what worked in one part of the state would not necessarily work in another. Special consideration needed to be given to each community’s particular needs. Policies designed to help those in tourism-based Miami wouldn’t work for those living in small agricultural towns like Immokalee.

Accordingly, Florida created twenty-four regional boards to develop and execute welfare services in their local regions. Floridians had applied the logic of the 1996 act, and taken the federal vision of the framers to its logical conclusion. If the devolution of social security to states worked, they reasoned, its further devolution to sub-units would work better. They were right.

The advantages of localism in welfare are easily listed.

First, large bureaucracies create unintended consequences. Where states and counties can tailor their policies
to suit local needs, a uniform system that covers 300 million people is bound to contain loopholes, tempting into dependency some who were never envisaged as claimants.

Second, proximity facilitates discernment. Person A may be a deserving widow who has been unlucky, while person B is a layabout. Local caseworkers may see this clearly. But if the universal rules handed down from Washington place the two applicants in the same category, they must be treated identically.

Third, pluralism spreads best practice. The freedom to innovate means that states can come up with ideas that Washington never would have dreamed of.

Fourth, non-state agents—churches, charities, businesses—are likelier to involve themselves in local projects than in national schemes, and such organizations are far better at taking people out of poverty than are government agencies.

Fifth, localism transforms attitudes. In Europe, many see benefit fraud as cheating “the system” rather than cheating their neighbors. People would take a very different attitude toward, say, the neighbor whom they knew to be claiming incapacity benefit while working as an electrician if they felt the impact in their local tax bill.

Finally, and perhaps most important, localism under-girds the notion of responsibility: our responsibility to support ourselves if we can, and our responsibility to those around us—not an abstract category of “the
underprivileged,” but visible neighbors—who, for whatever reason, cannot support themselves. No longer is obligation discharged when we have paid our taxes. Localism, in short, makes us better citizens.

Which is why it is such a pity to see that the 1996 legislation has now been eclipsed. In all the fuss about the stimulus package of February 2009, its most damaging provisions were barely reported. Under the guise of contingency, Washington has casually reassumed control of welfare spending. The reforms are over. America is drifting back to dependency.

DON’T EUROPEANIZE SOCIETY

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Europeans and Americans approach social policy from different perspectives. In Europe, government action is considered morally preferable to individual benevolence. The former allows poor people to claim an entitlement that is theirs by right. The latter demeans them by obliging them to take charity.

The United States, until very recently at any rate, has remained faithful to what I identified in chapter 1 as the Miltonian vision of liberty: the belief that virtue cannot be coerced. Thus, choosing to make a donation is meritorious, whereas having your contribution forcibly taken from you through taxation and spent on your
behalf robs you of the opportunity to have acted morally.

The European conception, of course, can easily descend into equating decency with high taxes. It can also make the related mistake of assuming that the level of welfare payments is the measure of a society’s collective humanity.

Both assumptions are flawed. I hope I don’t need to persuade readers that private philanthropy is generally more efficient than taxation, as well as morally preferable. Equally, though, the poor suffer from the assumption that what they need is larger handouts.

Poverty is not simply an absence of wealth. It is bound up with a series of other factors: family breakdown, substance abuse, poor educational qualifications, low expectations. It follows that you do not address the problem of poverty by giving money to the poor. To take an extreme example, giving $1,000 to a drug addict is not, in the long term, going to make him better off. Poverty is best solved holistically, by tackling its contributory conditions.

Sadly, in Europe, the poor generally have been left to the left, with consequences that, while inconvenient to the taxpayer, are disastrous for the destitute. Second-and third-generation welfare claimants are growing up without any connection to the world of work. For, just as governments were bad at building cars or installing telephones, just as they made a poor job of operating
airlines or administering hospitals, so they have made a terrible mess of the relief of poverty.

In assuming monopolistic responsibility for social policy, European states have balefully redefined how their citizens relate to one another. It wasn’t so long ago that any adult, seeing a child out of school during term, would stop him and say, “Why aren’t you in class?” Now this is seen as the state’s duty. It wasn’t so long ago that we all kept an eye out for elderly neighbors, and looked to see that they were still collecting their milk bottles each morning. Now this, too, is seen as the government’s responsibility. When unusually heavy snow carpeted Europe at the end of 2009, people complained because the authorities were slow to clear their driveways and pavements. Their grandparents simply would have taken out their shovels.

The most damaging aspect of Euro-statism is neither its deleterious economic effects nor its inefficiency, but its impact on the private sphere. As the state has expanded, society has dwindled. Government officials—outreach workers, disability awareness counselors, diversity advisers, inspectors, regulators, licensors, clerks—have extended their jurisdiction. But they have done so at the expense of traditional authority figures: parents, school principals, clergymen.

The state has assumed control over functions that were once discharged within families: health, education,
day care, provision for the elderly. So it is perhaps no surprise that the family itself, in Europe, is in decline.

I don’t simply mean that the nuclear family has been replaced by a broader diversity of combinations. I mean that there are fewer and fewer babies. The current population of the continent, including European Russia, is around 720 million. According to a UN forecast, that figure will have fallen to 600 million by 2050. Germany’s population will fall by 20 million, Russia’s by 30 million-a far greater loss than was suffered as a consequence of the Nazi invasion and consequent deportations. The EU’s own statistical office, Eurostat, tells a similar story. Within the next fifty years, it expects Germany’s population to fall by 14 percent, Poland’s by 18—figures that include net immigration.

Total Fertility Rate, 2008

Sources: Eurostat and U.S. Census data

Albania is the only European country with what demographers call replacement level fertility: 2.1 or more live births per woman. In every other European state, the population will decline except to the extent that it is offset by immigration. This is not, unlike most forecasts, based on an extrapolation of current trends. The fall in births has already happened: It’s a fact. All that remains to us is to decide how to deal with its consequences.

We can also, of course, speculate about its causes. Perhaps the babies are missing because of the spread of contraception and the legalization of abortion. Perhaps the decline has to do with lifestyle changes and the fact that women are settling down at a later age. Perhaps it is simply a function of choice, or of a fashion for smaller units.

The one thing we can say definitively is this: The problem is not nearly so severe in the United States. The number of live births per American woman is almost exactly what demographers estimate to be the rate at which a population will remain stable: 2.1. In Europe, the figure is 1.5.

Can we connect these figures to politics? I think so. What Europeans most disdain in America, especially Red State America, is cultural conservatism. Even those who have little truck with anti-Americanism feel more or less obliged to sneer at America’s Christian Right. But I can’t help noticing that values voters seem to be keeping up their numbers. Just as the United States is outbreeding Europe, so the Republicans are outbreeding the Democrats. Mega-churches may offend European taste, but they have plenty of children in their Sunday schools.

The higher rates of church attendance in the United States are arguably themselves a product of small government. The United States was founded on the basis that there would be no state church; instead, there
would be friendly competition among congregations. In most of Europe, by contrast, there is either a single state church or a number of approved religious bodies, often in receipt of state funds. In other words, religion in the United States has been privatized: There is a free market of denominations. And privatization, as we know, tends to raise standards across the board. With no state support, American churches compete for worshippers, and worshippers compete to raise their ministers’ salaries. At the same time, people tend to be more loyal to what they have chosen than to what they have been allocated.

European countries retain the outward forms of religion. Monarchs mark the key events of their reigns with religious services and bishops participate at state functions, but the cathedrals are empty.

It is perhaps no coincidence that European Muslims, who are less secularized than their neighbors, have commensurately higher birthrates. Albania, which, as I say, is the only European state sustaining its population through natural fecundity, is also the only Muslim state in Europe. I traveled often in Turkey (2.5 live births per woman) when my own children were babies. I discovered that it is quite normal there for passing strangers, of both sexes, to lift toddlers out of their strollers and hold them aloft, declaring delightedly: “Thanks be to God!” I don’t
want to construct an elaborate theory of demographics on one heartwarming Turkish custom, but might there be a link between birthrates and collective optimism?

Consider the chronology. The major expansion of government in Europe came during World War II; powers seized on a supposedly contingent basis during mobilization generally were retained when peace returned. Exactly a generation later, from about 1970, birthrates plummeted. The first generation raised with cradle to grave welfare, to be excused from the traditional responsibilities of adulthood, was also the first to give up on parenthood. Throughout this period, there was a decline, not only in church attendance, but in the social values that traditional morality had encouraged.

I am not positing a sole and sequential link between these developments. Plainly there are several factors at work, and we should be careful not to oversimplify. But we can say one thing with confidence: Europeans are extraordinarily relaxed about their continent’s sterility. If the figures cited by the UN and Eurostat are even vaguely accurate, Europe faces a choice between depopulation and immigration on a scale never before seen. In a healthy polity, you’d expect there to be a lively debate about what to do next. But European voters have long since given up on politics as a means to deliver
meaningful change. It’s altogether more pleasant to talk about something else.

DON’T EUROPEANIZE IMMIGRATION

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In Amsterdam on November 2, 2004, Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Dutch Moroccan, shot Theo Van Gogh, a filmmaker and professional pain-in-the-neck, before methodically slicing him open with a machete. He then strolled calmly away, telling a screaming witness, “Now you know what you people can expect in the future.”

The fact that Bouyeri, like the murderer of the populist politician Pim Fortuyn eighteen months previously, had pedaled to the crime scene by bicycle, gave the affair a grisly Dutch motif, but the controversy quickly became global.

Most European governments recognized the problem: They, too, had managed to alienate a minority of their second-generation immigrants to the point of driving them into armed revolt.

Over the past decade, dozens of young British men have traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan to take up arms against their fellow countrymen. At least two crossed from the Gaza Strip into Israel as suicide bombers.
Others have been involved in domestic terrorism, notably a bomb attempt on the London Underground.