The Labour Party Advocates Buying Off the Barbarians: The Decline of the Welfare State Enters a New and Dangerous Phase

The world has watched the horrifying pictures from London the past few days of mostly black young people rioting. It looked amazingly similar to the mostly white young people rioting a few weeks ago in Vancouver. There were no chants or homemade signs and no leaders giving speeches, yet the BBC, in a classic example of media manipulation of public opinion, called them "protesters."

It was not a political event; it was post-political. The police don't know what to do because the politicians who give them orders don't know what to do. In fact, the politicians are basically irrelevant at this point. They certainly have contributed to the problem by enacting policies whose effects were to destroy the family, make an entire underclass dependent on the state and replace education in the classical sense with group therapy. But they are irrelevant because, although their policies can tear down and destroy public morality and family structures, what was destroyed cannot be replaced by public policies. As Christopher Dawson said with reference to the fragility of culture, what took 1000 years to build can be destroyed in a few days.

Nihilism is not pretty. When the masses take Bloomsbury moral relativism seriously the results are ugly. When religion is scorned, Christianity is oppressed, hedonism is celebrated and freedom redefined down as licentiousness, one simply has to expect riots like these ones.

There came a moment in the history of the Roman Empire when the Roman political elite knew that they could not afford to pay for enough legions in enough different points along the borders of the empire to defeat militarily the barbarian tribes because there were too many tribes in too many places. They then switched strategies and moved from trying to crush them with military might to trying to buy them off.

In the following clip, Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of Labour is on TV with Michael Gove of the Conservative Party. With the riots still going on she can't resist criticizing the coalition for spending cuts as if there was a link between the cuts and the riots. Gove is furious and doesn't let her get away with it. Now, he was legitimately angry at the way she sought to score cheap political points out of a human tragedy and appear to justify, at least in part, the actions of the mob. But there is a deeper point to be taken from her comments. I'd say she represents the political establishment that is frightened by the mob and wishes to do whatever has to be done to buy them off. She is the voice of the Generation of '68 that is all out of ideas and does not know what to do. She tries to come off as righteously indignant, but doesn't quite manage it.



I would suggest that Harman is the face of the liberal welfare state establishment that is now tottering precariously under the weight of its own contradictions. The European superstate is going broke and its leaders are desperately afraid of democracy lest the voting public demonstrate its disagreement with their Utopian statism.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the American Left couldn't have picked a less auspicious moment to try and sell voters on what a swell idea it would be for the US to undergo "fundamental transformation" in order to become a European-style social democracy. The next election will likely bury the Left for a generation in the US; whether or not it is too late for the UK remains to be seen but portents are ominous.

The problem with barbarians is that they cannot be bought off for long. Why in the world should they behave nicely in order to be paid by the State to sit on their hands when they can simply take what they want whenever they want it? Have they not been educated in school to indulge their sexual desires as soon as puberty hits? Is that not the point of liberal sex education? "Just use a condom dear and have a nice time." Having learned that delayed gratification is not cool, why not smash that window and take the wide screen TV right now? If you are taught that you are entitled, how do you know when to draw the line? Who knew that there were lines?

The supposedly liberal, (but really creeping socialist), big-government, high-tax and spend, welfare states of the modern West have created a dependent underclass of barbarians by policies that undercut the family, eviscerate education of discipline and promote moral relativism and an entitlement mentality. Now the problem is what to do with them.

What is truly sad is that left-wing politicians like Harriet Harman actually are shocked because after all they have done for young people, these young people act like this. But they are so trapped in their own, little worldview bubble that they have no way to make sense out of the world as it crumbles around them. They can give no rational account of the problem except to say: "We need to spend more, drive the country deeper in debt, double down on multicultural relativism and demonize Christianity, traditional morality and the inculcation of self-discipline even more." Any other ideas? Didn't think so.

It is apparent that President Obama is, like Harman, totally bereft of ideas. During the debt ceiling debate the purported "adult in the room" was reduced to preaching class warfare and making partisan speeches with an eye to his re-election campaign when the country teetered on the brink of a shutdown (it was never even close to default). In this clip, Republican congressman Lankford offers up a great quote. With reference to Obama's class warfare rhetoric in his debt ceiling speech carried live on national TV on July 29, Lankford said: "It felt like he was saying grab your pitchforks and run to a rich guy's house and take his stuff because he's the problem or she's the problem." It comes early in this clip.



In the UK there was almost 14 years of this same class warfare rhetoric from the party in power and the Coalition is only mildly more conservative; in many ways it carries on the same line. And of course the establishment of the British welfare state has been an on-going project for over 60 years. The US may a little way to go before its capital erupts in flames but if the anti-rich rhetoric continues it is inevitable that the same thing will happen in the US as has happened in Canada and the UK.

Lankford sounds prophetic; Obama sounds desperate. Harman sounds scared. There is the progression for you.

It is pitiful and tragic. We shall all pay the price for a half century of creating an entitlement mentality in young barbarians whether we were in favor of it or not.

Is it Fair to Hold Democratic Socialists Responsible for Stalin's Crimes?

This is a provocative question designed to get your attention. But the answer to this question is more complicated than you might think.

After Khrushchev's secret speech to the Soviet Politburo in 1956 and the invasion of Hungary in the same year, the Communists, fellow-travelers and other left-leaning individuals in the West became aware of the crimes of Stalin and the utter and complete failure of the Marxist-Leninist revolution in the Soviet Union. Stalinism was revealed as a totalitarian, anti-human, evil political movement. The question was how far back in the genealogy of this movement did the poison go?

So if Stalinism was evil, did that discredit Lenin? If Lenin was discredited, did that discredit Trotsky too? or Mao? or Castro? or Third World liberation movements like the Sandinistas? If Lenin and Trotsky were discredited were Marx's ideas discredited too? If Marx's ideas are discredited, are just some of his ideas discredited or his system as a whole? If Marx's ideas (or some of them) are discredited, are social democratic principles discredited as well? Or does the magic bullet of "democracy" instantly transform evil into good?

The issue is which, if any, parts of "The Left" escape responsibility for Stalin's evil deeds. Ideas that are put into practice and result in murder, tyranny and poverty are not good ideas and only half implementing them or implementing them as only as thoroughly as possible in the face of determined conservative resistance does not make them into good ideas. It may well be that the only reason socialism has not (yet) resulted in horrible evils in Western Europe is that these ideas have not been as fully implemented as they were in the Soviet Union; but that does not make them benign or morally good.

The New Left that arose in the West between the late 1950s and early 1970s was an attempt to be Marxist but not Stalinist. Yet, as David Horowitz (who was at the center of the rise of the New Left in Berkley, California) chronicles in his political memoir, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, makes clear, the New Left not only did not abandon the Marxist ideas that were put into practice by Lenin and Stalin (with their own twists and adapted to their own historical context), but the New Left also fell for the siren call of violence and destruction as the way to advance the revolution.

For one example, the New Left valorized the murders and drug pushers who made up the Black Panther Party. Horowitz recounts his own personal involvement with Huey Newton and his defense of the Panthers as editor of Ramparts magazine. One factor that eventually drove him away from the New Left was the murder of a friend of his who he recommended to the organization and who was asking too many pointed questions about party finances. Another example was the take-over of the Students for a Democratic Society by the ultra-extreme Weathermen, who were committed to using violence to provoke the revolutionary war that would overthrow the American government. New Leftists like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were involved in acts of terrorism in an attempt to ferment revolution; democracy was a failure for them.

So the attempt by the New Left in the 1960s to be Marxist (or even Communist) without being Stalinist must be judged a failure. Even many of the central players themselves seemed to recognize this. Ayers and Dohrn, like Tom Hayden and many others, eventually gave up revolutionary violence (that is, for their part, though they still supported it in other parts of the world) and began to work within "the system" to change it according to their own Darwinist-Marxist worldview. They have been part of the "long march through the institutions" the goal of which is to subvert the Capitalist West from within rather than confronting it directly through revolutionary violence.

It is clear that the strategy of using Marxist ideas but renouncing Stalinist violence and embracing democracy is perfectly compatible with calling oneself either a "Progressive" (which many in the Democratic Party do today) or a "Democratic Socialist" (which is more of a European label). In other words, I am questioning whether a Marxist who claims to be committed to democratic process is any less dangerous or culpable than an outright Communist who is infiltrating the system to undermine it from within. Does a commitment to procedural democracy in and of itself sanitize false view of human nature, history and justice?

My point is that the ideas are far more profoundly important than the political strategy. The methods can change according to the circumstances. But what is the ultimate goal? And what view of human nature is driving the movement? And is the movement based on a materialist interpretation of history? Is the definition of justice compatible with absolute right and wrong written into creation the Creator or is it a social construct, a projection of the will of the strong?

What got me thinking along these lines was the observation that radical Islamists have learned how to use Western democracy for profoundly anti-democratic goals. The goal of an imposition of sharia law and an Islamic theocracy is utterly anti-democratic, but what if the majority vote for it? Does it suddenly become good? And if a majority of American voted in a Hitler (as the Germany people did) or a Stalin, would that make the ensuing regime morally good? The only possible answer to these questions is "no" - unless on wants to defend the Third Reich.

But what would the West have to believe in order to say no and defend itself against a determined foe who uses individual liberties to subvert individual liberty, uses religious freedom to subvert freedom of religion, uses free speech to stifle free speech, uses democracy to implement a system run by unelected religious leaders who, once in power, are answerable to no one (as in Iran, for example)?

The West faces the same dilemma with regard both to Marxism and Islamism. Both are essentially totalitarian systems based on heretical doctrines that want to supplant Western liberal democracy with their own regime. Both are adept at using democracy to overthrow liberal democracy.

The answer is that the West needs a commitment to certain principles and beliefs that go far deeper than procedural democracy and individual liberty. These good political beliefs must be grounded in deeper metaphysical and ethical beliefs - in certain convictions about man being created in the image of God and in natural law and in the reality of original sin and the the folly of utopianism. A deep respect for tradition and a healthy suspicion of radical social engineering will help, but even these will not replace what are ultimately religious convictions about the nature of God, the nature of man and the limits of politics. Without such convictions, traditionalism will degenerate into a mindless nostalgia and narrow-mindedness.

The West needs a revival of Christianity and this is the crucial issue in whether the West will survive or fall. Only a religious people committed to faith in God will be able to withstand the assaults from Islamism and Marxism. Only the Judeo-Christian worldview that built the West can sustain it through this crisis. If this is not present, then freedom is at risk.

Will America Go the Way of Greece?

This story in the New York Times about the state of railroads in Greece is like a scene right out of Atlas Shrugged. Having recently read that novel and now reading today's New York Times is an unsettling experience.

Losses at Hellenic Railways, however, continue to mount — at the rate of 3 million euros ($3.8 million) a day. Its total debt has increased to $13 billion, or about 5 percent of Greece’s gross domestic product.

In spite of about $3.2 billion of investment since 1997, outside of the main route between Athens and Thessaloniki, the network seems in many respects patchwork and at times chaotic.

Earlier this month, for example, a trip from Athens to Diakopto, a seaside town on the northern coast of the Peloponnese, took more than four hours. The journey required train passengers to complete a second leg by transferring to an overcrowded bus that was delayed for an hour. The result was a near riot as enraged passengers hurled abuse at overwhelmed train officials.

The same trip by car would take less than two hours.

So the railway is a sinkhole for public money, but it is also disgracefully inefficient. Does the union care?

“It is crazy,” said Nikolaos Kioutsoukis, the union chief for the railway. “It’s not surprising that people prefer to go by car.”

Even he accepts that train travel in Greece is not financially viable on many routes. He blames low prices, misguided investment and political meddling for the railway’s poor condition, and says the government should make new investments to modernize the network. He opposes privatization and says that if jobs and benefits are threatened, the union will strike.

He admits the problem but threatens to undermine any attempt to fix the problem. This is unbelievable. He apparently thinks the EU owes him and his membership a living and he does not care that the system is on the brink of collapse. This is the socialist mentality on display for all to see.

Haris Tsiokas, the general secretary for the Greek Transport Ministry, contends that the government’s plan to close at least 35 loss-making routes and cut 2,500 jobs (1,000 via mandatory retirement, with the rest being moved to other government jobs) will make Hellenic Railways attractive to foreign investors. But he concedes that the pressure is building for the railway, which, for now at least, does not have access to debt markets.

Now, as a condition of Greece’s financial rescue, the International Monetary Fund is demanding that a solution be found. The fund and the European Union, which also chipped in to provide the bailout, are requiring that the debt of Hellenic Railways, as well as the off-balance-sheet obligations of other state-owned enterprises, be counted toward Greece’s official debt — which Greece has agreed to do.

Analysts estimate the total to be around $33.6 billion, a sum that would add another 11 percentage points to Greece’s current debt level of about 120 percent of gross domestic product. It would also surely raise questions for many investors about the government’s ability to repay ever-increasing amounts as the overall economy contracts.

The problem here is that the government is not running a railroad. It is running a ponzi scheme that is on the verge of collapse.

Until now, Greece has been able to use its rail system as a means to support employment while not adding to its official debt number.

“This was an accounting trick, another good way for the government to hide its debt,” said John C. Mourmouris, a former chief executive of the railway who is now an economics professor here. “But a company with 100 million euros in revenue can no longer borrow 1 billion euros a year.”

Read it all here. If the NYT says it is this bad, the reality is likely worse.

Greece is just the worst case in Europe (so far as we know now), but it is by no means atypical of the European social democratic welfare state and there are several other countries close behind Greece such as Portugal, Spain and Italy.

When you consider that Obama and the leftists of the Democratic Party are trying their level best to transform America into a European-style, social democracy, it is a wonder that the American public is not more up in arms that it is. The Tea Party movement is a sign that America is rejecting the leftist agenda, but it is a tribute to how powerful the Marxists true believers are in America that any Democrat at all is projected to hang on to his or her seat in November.

However, Rasmussen Polls is now saying that the Republicans are projected to have 44 seats in the Senate after the November elections with the Democrats projected to have 49 with 7 more as toss ups. If the Republicans run the table on the toss-ups, they could have control of the Senate after November. This is still a long-shot but much less of a long-shot than it was 3 months ago. The House, where more Democratic seats are in play, is likely going to go Republican and the Senate is on the edge. If the slide of America into Greek-style socialism is to be halted, the November elections are absolutely crucial.

Marxism: The Great Western Heresy

The greatest threat to peace, justice and freedom in the word today comes, not from Christianity as the Left would have you believe, but from the heretical offshoot of Christianity known as Marxism.

When I speak of "the Left" I am using a deliberately vague word whose meaning expands and contracts depending upon the context. It is an umbrella term that includes a number of different categories of people, publications and organizations, all of which trace their intellectual heritage back to Karl Marx (just as groups as different as the Roman Catholic Church, Baptists and Messianic Jews all trace their heritage back to Jesus Christ.) Let me list some of them:

1. Communists - or Marxist/Leninists or Stalinists - unreconstructed cold warriors; many European countries still have Communist parties capable of winning seats in the legislature.
2. Social Democrats - Marxists who renounce violence to achieve their collectivist goals; often believe in a highly taxed, tightly regulated and state monitored "free" market to generate wealth.
3. Progressives - an American movement originating in the early 20th century and dominant in today's Democratic Party that seeks to head off full-blown Communism by transforming America into a European-style, social democratic state.
4. Big Government Liberals -or Welfare State Liberals are liberals in the process of losing their faith in liberalism and becoming socialists in all but name. There is a controversy whether people who self-identify in this way are cynically using a more palatable political label or whether they are honestly trying to prevent Communism by moving in a social democratic or welfare state direction. (The same goes for Progressives.)
5. Liberation Theologians - attempt to combine Marxist analysis with a secularized, politicized, immanentized version of Christian eschatology
6. Anti-Globalization Protesters - also known as Anti-Capitalists; you see this show on TV every time there is a G20 or G8 Summit. These people simplistically identify Capitalism as the source of all evil in the world, but some will not admit to being socialists or communists. The hard core of the movement, however, is definitely Marxist of some kind and the rest are fellow-travelers.
7. Anarchists -claim to believe that no government would be better than imperfect government; it is difficult to believe that they believe in what they claim to believe. Underneath the anarchist exterior is usually a Utopian core. They feel free to tear down without proposing an alternative order because they naively believe that whatever arises after the destruction of the current political order would necessarily be better than the status quo. If you didn't believe that, then you would be no better than a common criminal.
8. Environmentalists - not all those concerned with pollution, but those with a Utopian, anti-industrialist society streak; the latter often make common cause with Marxists.
9. Feminists - second wave Feminists originating in the 1960s use Marxist analysis instead of appealing to Christian humanism and Enlightenment rationalism as earlier Feminists did.

While these nine distinct groups differ over tactics and although some are more extreme than others, all share a common hatred of:

1. Natural law - the belief in objective moral rules and principles that are based in the way reality is; may be specifically Christian or may be rooted in other religions or worldviews.
2. Free enterprise and Private Property - even though many of the movements mentioned above claim to respect private property and the market mechanism, the fact is that doing so makes them inconsistent Marxists. For Marx, private property is equivalent to the disobedience of God's command in Gen. 3 as the cause of original sin.
3. Individual Freedom under the Rule of Law - The state is superior to the individual in all forms of Marxism, which is to say that "Social Justice" (or equality) trumps "Individual Freedom" (or liberty).
4. Judeo-Christian Religion - The Ten Commandments is the basis of Western law and natural law is understood as being congruent with natural law.

Some of these groups claim merely to use Marxist analysis to diagnose the nature of the problems of the world (eg. Latin American Liberation Theology), while others believe that Marxism provides the positive solution as well as the diagnosis of the problem. It is not easy to tell what an individual person believes because in some cases it would make no sense to diagnose capitalism as the problem if socialism is not the solution. In such a case what would the solution be?

All believe that America and Israel are evil and must be severely weakened, if not destroyed. (Anti-Colonialism is often code for Anti-Americanism). They all believe that after a purging of capitalism and liberal democracy from the world there will emerge, somehow, a new world that will be better. All the ideological descendants of Marxism are essentially Utopian. This is the new religion that has come to dominate the Western academy and academic freedom is a tool it uses to eradicate all traces of the Judeo-Christian and Greek philosophical heritage that undergirds the West from the academy.

It is no stretch to call this multi-faceted movement, which traces its roots back to all or aspects of the thought of Karl Marx, a new religion. It is actually a Christian heresy, however, which means that it is a corruption of and a departure from Christianity. A new religion that has its origins in Christianity is a heresy and one that does not have its roots in Christianity is simply another religion, but not a heresy.

1. Eschatology - the Christian idea of the Kingdom of God, which is heaven come to earth after the return of Christ, the final judgment and the resurrection of the dead, is transformed into an earthly political kingdom founded through revolution (or, in the progressive version, through continuous socio-political progress).

2. Redemption - the Christian teaching that God becomes incarnate in Jesus and sheds his blood to propitiate his own justice so that sinful humanity can be redeemed is transformed into the doctrine that bloody revolution and mass murder are the prerequisites for the coming of Utopia and therefore all Marxist-inspired revolutions from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot to Castro and so on have all been bloody and the blood is seen as redemptive.

3. Sin - the Christian teaching that human beings are born in sin by virtue of being descendants of Adam and Eve and then go on to actualize this evil tendency by their own free will is changed into the idea that individuals are born innocent but suffer evil because a corrupt socio-economic system (Capitalism) dominates the world. (Where evil came from before the invention of Capitalism is not explained, but if you go back far enough in history, they believe, you find matriarchal, socialist, free-sex Utopias all over the place. When somebody invented private property - that was the beginning of evil in the world.)

So Marxism is a Christian heresy and Modernity is the period of Western civilization in which this heresy gradually replaces and drives out orthodox Christianity. We are living in the period after Christendom in the sense that we live in the declining phase of Western culture during which time time the heresy predominates, although orthodox Christianity is far from dead. Yet the center of the Christian world is moving south as the Marxist heresy spreads throughout the West. Whether or not some form of Marxism will triumph in the West is not yet known, nor do we know which form it will take if it does. But this we know: if it does triumph Christianity will be eradicated.

How the Welfare State Oppresses the Poor

During the 195s and 1960s the poverty rate in the US was declining, but for some reason, in 1968 the rate leveled off at 13% and has never gone lower in the years since 1968. Although it has risen and fallen since that point, it has never gone below 13%. Why has poverty not declined since then? Why was it declining prior to 1968? And what could be done to reduce it even lower in the future? The answers to these questions will explain why the social democratic state is unjust and bad news for the poor. Jonathan Leaf in his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties explains:

". . . President Johnson in January 1964 declared a "War on Poverty," which would become the centerpiece of his "Great Society" program. Poverty rates were already falling then, coinciding with the economic boom of the early-to-mid 1960s, but by the time Johnson relinquished the presidency five years later, poverty rates were rebounding strongly. What's more, the War on Poverty quickly ushered in dramatic increases in a wide range of social pathologies - crime, illegitimacy, drug abuse, and welfare dependency, to name a few. A generation of young, urban minorities began acting in harmful ways that had not been predicted by the statisticians and sociologists whose work had justified the War on Poverty programs." (p. 163)

As Leaf points out, human behavior is complex and difficult to predict. Obviously, however, the War on Poverty was won decisively by poverty, not by the US Federal Government. So the question is, why is the Left fifty years later still pursuing the same failed policies of high taxation, increased government spending on welfare, and creating dependency on the government instead of returning to the policies of lower taxation, limited government and encouraging free enterprise and self-reliance? The answer is that the Left is driven, not by results oriented, pragmatic goals, but by ideology.

Here are some of the government welfare schemes started or greatly expanded in the War on Poverty: food stamps, job training courses, community redevelopment block grants, urban redevelopment and regional development schemes, medicaid, aid to families with dependent children, social security disability income, section 8 housing grants, emergency assistance to needy families with children, college scholarship aid, free and reduced price school lunches, child care programs, construction of housing projects, head start. (p. 164)

These programs, which were especially targeted at urban blacks, caused young black men to drop out of the labor force because the government paid them not to work. Furthermore, the government provided financial incentives to young women to have babies without getting married. This basically destroyed the urban black family unit; black illegitimacy rates today approach 70%. Urban black people are no longer organized in families, but are strictly individuals totally dependent on the State. It is really a new form of slavery and just as pernicious.

Some would see this as the unintended consequences of well-meaning people and programs, which did not work out as planned. Some would create rationalizations for why it did not work, such as racism. Yet, poverty among blacks was declining prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so if racism is the problem, that should not have been happening. Others would see the rise of the welfare state as an accomplishment of the real goals of socialist social engineers who seek above all else to destroy the market, the family and all other social institutions that interfere with the complete dependency of the individual on the State.

European Social Democracy is Not Merely Unsustainable; It is Also Fundamentally Unjust

The Left has been attempting to move Canada and the US to the European model of social democracy in the name of social justice. The assumption is that socialism is just and so any approximation of socialist ideals, as in the European social democratic model, is more just than any capitalist system. Conservatives often find themselves on the defensive in the face of leftist dogma about social justice. Often, all conservatives do is to point out how inefficient social democracy is, which cedes the moral high ground to the socialists.

Samuel Gregg, however, goes on the offensive in his article "Europe: the Unjust Continent," and shows how unjust Europe is precisely insofar as it has implemented the social democratic system. He goes beyond the oft-made claim that Europe does not work to the more rarely heard, but much more significant, claim that Europe is fundamentally unjust.

In recent months, the European social model has been under the spotlight following Greece's economic meltdown and the fumbling efforts of European politicians to prop up other tottering European economies. To an unprecedented extent, the post-war European model's sustainability is being questioned. Even the New York Times has conceded something is fundamentally wrong with the model they and the American Left have been urging upon America for decades.

Western Europe's postwar economies were shaped by an apparent concern for the economically marginalized and the desire to realize more just societies. This inspired the extensive government economic intervention, high-tax rates and generous welfare states now characterizing most contemporary European economies. After 1945, Communists and Christian Democrats alike rallied around these policies. For Marxists, it was a step toward realizing their dream. For non-Marxists, it was a way of preventing outright collectivization.

Even today, words like “solidarity” and “social justice” permeate European discussion to an extent unimaginable in the rest of the world. If you want proof, just switch on a French television or open a German newspaper. The same media regularly contrast Europe's concern for justice with America's economic culture. America, many Europeans will tell you, embodies terrible economic injustices in the form of “immense” wealth-disparities, “grossly inadequate” healthcare, and “savage” competition.

But while such mythologies dominate European discourse, it's also true that Western Europe's economic culture is characterized by a deeply unjust fracture. Modern Europe is a continent increasingly divided between what Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi called in The Future of Europe (2006) “insiders” and “outsiders”.

The “insiders” are establishment politicians of left and right, trade unions, public sector workers, politically-connected businesses, pensioners, and those (such as farmers) receiving subsidies. The “outsiders” include, among others, entrepreneurs, immigrants, and the young. Naturally the insiders do everything they can to maintain their position and marginalize outsiders' opportunities for advancement.

So how do Europe's insiders maintain the status quo?

First, one needs to understand that Western European governments are largely managed by a political class that transcends ideological divisions. In France, for example, the main parties of right and left are dominated by people who went to the grandes écoles­ – elite educational institutions that are very difficult to enter but whose graduates supply most of France's business leaders, politicians, and civil servants. It's not untypical for a grande école product to work for a politically-connected corporation, switch to the civil service, return to the private sector, before eventually becoming a member of parliament.

France is an extreme case, but this situation manifests itself throughout Western Europe. Not surprisingly, this group – whatever their political differences – generally agree that they should be in charge. Indeed, Europe's political class is exceptionally good at self-perpetuation. It's common, for example, for politicians' children to follow the same road to power. Take Greece's current socialist prime minister, George Papandreou. His father and grandfather were also Greek prime ministers. In America, not even the Bushes have emulated this dynastic feat. Incidentally, Papandreou's predecessor as Prime Minister, the conservative Konstantinos Karamanlis, had an uncle who was prime minister of Greece 4 times and president twice.

Second, there is the phenomenon of what the Nobel Prize economist George Stigler identified in 1971 as “regulatory capture.” As Alesina and Giavazzi demonstrate, European regulators invariably identify themselves with those they are supposed to regulate – sometimes in return for jobs in a post-regulator life – and work hard to limit competition from new businesses or entrepreneurs.

This is a manifestation of a third disorder: European insiders' willingness to use state power to keep European outsiders marginalized. European unions, for example, could care less about the unemployed and immigrants. Instead they press governments to make it very hard for companies to fire anyone, especially union members. Employers are consequently reluctant to hire. Many young Europeans and recent immigrants are thus condemned to cobbling together part-time employment contracts with no benefits.

. . . snip . . .

Of course every society has its elites. The real question is whether a society embodies the possibility of social mobility through hard work and accessibility to economic opportunity.

This is what makes modern Europe's endless justice rhetoric so distasteful. All the tedious solidarity-talk and social justice-speak essentially masks a social stratification based on the highly-unjust foundation of proximity to government power – a situation which further incentivizes everyone to join the daily jostle to obtain state-mandated privileges.

It's difficult to imagine a more damning moral indictment of Europe's discredited economic culture.

The significance of Gregg's analysis here, which I think is sound and devastating, is that it leaves Europe with immoral social policies and laws regarding the sanctity of human life and the traditional family, as well as unjust economic laws and a democratic deficit. Given all of that, it is little wonder that demographic disaster looms and the culture of death is pervasive.