Beyond the Welfare State
26th June 2011
Yuval Levin tries to get things back on track.
All over the developed world, nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social-democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable. The reason is partly institutional: The administrative state is dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety. The reason is also partly cultural and moral: The attempt to rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility has undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government. But, in practice, it is above all fiscal: The welfare state has turned out to be unaffordable, dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era. Sustaining existing programs of social insurance, let alone continuing to build new ones on the social-democratic model, has become increasingly difficult in recent years, and projections for the coming decades paint an impossibly grim and baleful picture. There is simply no way that Europe, Japan, or America can actually go where the economists’ long-term charts now point — to debts that utterly overwhelm their productive capacities, governments that do almost nothing but support the elderly, and economies with no room for dynamism, for growth, or for youth. Some change must come, and so it will.
June 30th, 2011 at 19:49
The answer: Death Panels to ration health care, and mandatory euthenasia @ age 70. That should take care of that pesky, too-expensive-because-too-sick elder generation problem. Then we can get back to the good ol’ days when you could pay a teenager $5 a week to mow your lawn.
July 1st, 2011 at 03:39
As the Europeans are quickly finding out. Unfortunately, they are also finding out that their fellow countrymen are neglecting to breed, so that $5 a week teenager is named Mohammed, and when he hits 17 he’s going to put a bomb in your garage when he stows the mower.