The Humanistic Argument Against the Welfare State

I've just finished reading Mark Steyn's new book, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, and it is simultaneously hilarious and frightening. His previous book, America Alone, argued that the West, with the sole exception of the US, was in serious decline and that the last battle for the humanistic ideals of the West would be fought in the US. His prophecies of the semi-Islamization of Europe were at first dismissed, then laughed at, then said to be true but further off than he claimed. Now they are simply coming true before our eyes.

And his argument that it is Western weakness, lack of cultural self-confidence and multiculturalism, rather than any external force, that is causing the West's decline appears more obviously true every day. The message of this new book is that the US is joining in the general Western decline and going downhill much faster than Canada or Europe.

Despite his hysterical critics on the left, Steyn is no national socialist (or any other kind of socialist), but rather a humanistic liberal who simply declined to evolve into a social democrat as almost all liberals have done in the twentieth century.

As it happens, I don't think he actually has any answers to offer those who accept the main premises of his cultural analysis. The real engine of humanism is Christianity and the whole reason most liberals became some sort of cultural Marxist or neo-Marxist or democratic socialist is that secularized liberalism is unsustainable. It contains a contradictory notion of freedom and so the idea of freedom gradually recedes and the idea of equality takes its place. Liberalism has no basis for actual humanism and therefore it must necessarily decline into the will to power. We see this decline everywhere today. But until Steyn is willing to admit that nothing short of a revival of Christian faith will save Western civilization, he is fated to be a critic with no alternative except his own brand of stoic decency.

But the most important idea Steyn has latched onto is a very big one: the most important critique of the welfare state is the humanistic one. The welfare state was and is justified by appeals to compassion and care for the poor and needy. But, in fact, it is the poor and the needy who suffer the most from the welfare state.

In his column yesterday in the Orange County Register, Steyn puts it this way:

This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the "abolition of want" to be accomplished by "co-operation between the State and the individual." In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life's vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: "Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity." The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays and Muslims. From page 204: "For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population."

I believe it is regarded as a sign of insanity to start quoting oneself, but at the risk of trying your patience I'll try one more, because it's the link between America's downgraded debt and Britain's downgraded citizenry:

"The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people."

Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the Earth's surface and a quarter of its population. When you're imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.

A system which brings you the highest rate of single mother families, the highest abortion rate, the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease and the highest rate of drug use can not, except by the most Orwellian misuse of language imaginable, be described as "liberating." It is precisely the opposite; it is enslaving and demeaning. It is not good for the poor and bad for the rich; it is bad for everybody, but especially the poor.

There are many reasons why the welfare state is bad, but the most serious one is that it wastes people. This is the humanistic argument against the welfare state.

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.

The Convergence of Liberalism and Socialism in the Twentieth Century: A Conservative Analysis

Since the Progressive Era, classical, 19th century liberalism, which emphasizes individual liberty, free markets and small government, has been on the decline in America. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries two different trajectories have been followed.

On the one hand, the cultural elites have increasingly rejected orthodox Christianity in favor of one sort of secularist ideas or another. The influence of Darwinism, German higher criticism, and scientific positivism led to the abandonment of basic Christian doctrines, especially in the liberal Protestant denominations.

On the other hand, liberalism's concept of equality before the law or equality of opportunity, was increasingly put on the defensive by the Marxist concept of equality of outcomes embedded in the welfare state ideal. Progressives, whose philosophy was rooted in romantics like Rousseau and Marx, pushed the idea that government should ensure social equality and the catchy phrase that came to express this idea was "social justice," which was seen as clearly superior to plain old-fashioned "justice."

This new notion of equality came to be treated as equal in importance to liberty; thus we see the philosopher John Rawl attempting to square the circle of having two at least partially incompatible first principles in liberal political philosophy in A Theory of Justice. His grand attempt was a failure and showed that when push comes to shove, liberals had nothing more substantial than utilitarianism to serve as a basis for resolving conflicts between equality and liberty. Alasdair MacIntyre shows in After Virtue that this utilitarianism resolves into emotivism and depends on social consensus for its legitimacy. When social consensus breaks down, as for example on abortion after the Supreme Court's ill-considered ruling in 1973, which did so much to call into question the legitimacy and impartiality of the judiciary, emotivism serves as nothing other than a mask for a Nietzschean will-to-power.

But if the new "social justice" liberalism or "socialist liberalism" was increasingly incoherent in terms of philosophical foundations, the old, classical, 19th century liberalism suffered from a similar deficit of philosophical foundations. The problem here was the drift of the cultural elites in America away from Christianity during the Progressive Era and the inadequacy of liberal democracy without a religious foundation was exposed. Liberalism is a fine social philosophy except when it loses a pre-political concept of the Good, which was supplied in the 18-19th centuries by Christianity. This is the significance of Tocqueville's remark in Democracy in America that the American constitution was fit for a religious people and no other. It is only safe to have a constitution that fails to name the highest Good as the foundation of society if the people for whom that constitution is designed share a common faith in God, morality and the soul that provide a commonly agreed upon core of behavior that all agree is basic to political life. The classical 19th century liberalism, which left individuals freer to pursue their own ideals than any political philosophy before in history only worked because a Christian culture made it "ordered liberty" rather than something more like amoral social Darwinism.

The intellectual incoherence of liberalism, as criticized by, for example, Louis Groarke in his article: "What is Freedom? Why Christianity and Theoretical Liberalism Cannot Be Reconciled," meant that liberalism increasingly became suspect for Christians and, at the same time, increasingly vulnerable to the arguments of socialists that equality can supply the missing content in an increasingly vacuous liberalism.

Some Christians, faced with the emptiness of liberalism and lacking the courage to advocate for the Judeo-Christian worldview as the necessary basis for Western culture in an increasingly secularized social context, were seduced into thinking that the Marxist idea of equality could make the empty liberalism (often scornfully known as "neo-liberalism," especially in Europe) more humanistic. They thought that the Marxist idea of equality could serve as a substitute for the Judeo-Christian doctrine of man created in the image of God. Just as Christianity had provided a moral foundation for 19th century liberalism, so Marxism might be able to provide a moral foundation for 20th century liberalism, they thought.

After the collapse of economic Marxism in 1979 as the Soviet Union dissolved and the Chinese Communist Party embraced a kind of "crony capitalism" or "state capitalism" in a series of pragmatic reforms that recognized the necessity of the market in wealth creation but retained the dominance of the Party in Chinese society, it seemed to some that Marxism was dead. But this was an illusion. Marxism continued to serve as a substitute religion for Western liberal elites who could no longer believe in traditional Christianity by purportedly contributing to political philosophy the ideal of equality of all as the raison de etre of the state.

Liberalism in the 21st century is really an amalgam of classical liberalism (J. S. Mill) and socialism (Karl Marx) and its intellectual incoherence, unresolved by the heroic efforts of John Rawls, remains problematic. Conservatives are those who believe that 19th century liberalism plus the West's Judeo-Christian heritage provides a way forward that marries tolerance and cultural creativity with solid pre-political, religious foundations.

The Conservative critique of contemporary liberalism is that of Dostoevesky in the Grand Inquisitor scene in The Brothers Karamazov: that the West is being tempted to give up freedom in exchange for security and equality. The Grand Inquisitor represents the State which has assumed religious functions to itself and presents itself to the populace as the Great Liberator and Provider which can be relied upon to make life safe and secure. Conservatives fear that the end point of contemporary liberalism is a soft totalitarianism of the sort described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Western culture, having roused itself for one last heroic battle against the hard totalitarianisms of Fascism, Nazism and Communism in the mid-twentieth century, is now exhausted and slowly declining into the soft totalitarianism of the welfare state. The current teetering of the Euro, the decline of Europe in general and the sovereign debt crisis threatening the Western world as a whole, however, make the West vulnerable to a new hard totalitarian threat in the form of militant, oil-money fueled Islam.

The liberal response to the conservative critique is simply to say: "Don't ask us to believe in Christianity again because we can't." Yet, one get the impression that the main problem they have with Christianity is not metaphysical or scientific in nature, but simply a refusal to give up the personal anarchism (let's not dignify it with the label of freedom) of the sexual revolution. They are open to believing in any god that allows sexual license, which makes pantheistic nature-worship attractive to some and a vague moralistic therapeutic deism attractive to others. But these gods do not provide a moral core of doctrine or a theory of human nature that could fund a reinvigorated political liberalism.

So debate about whether or not Obama is a socialist is moot. It is as equally meaningless to scornfully dismiss the idea that he is a Marxist Leninist as it is to dismiss the idea that he was not born in the United States. Of course, he is not a 1930s Stalinist and of course he is not an alien. But to think that saying this means that he is not an enemy of classical liberalism or a proponent of a socialist-shaped kind of liberalism is equally ridiculous. He is a product of the 20th century fusion of the socialist ideal of equality with a drifting, incoherent political liberalism, which has been detached from its Christian roots.

What contemporary liberals need to understand, and often don't, is that the conservatives are as strongly opposed to contemporary progressivism (contemporary socialist-shaped liberalism) as they are to Marxism itself. The critique is not just about levels of taxation, amount of government regulation or social conservative moral views. The critique is far deeper and more profound that that. The basic critique of contemporary liberalism is that it lacks the philosophical foundations that are necessary to resist creeping soft totalitarianism and therefore it is inadequate as a cultural foundation for the West going forward. It is shallow, out-of-date, and dangerous, and represents a hollowed-out, secularized form of Christianity that is merely a pale reflection of the real thing, a reflection that is rapidly fading into history as the West continues its long, sad, decline.

Do You Really Want to Be More Like Europe?

It is generally acknowledged (except by White House message minders wary of electoral prospects) that the direction Barack Obama is taking the United States is toward becoming more like Europe in a myriad of ways. He would have Americans stop clinging to their guns and religion, expand the welfare state, raise taxes, accept slow economic growth and high unemployment as permanent, make marriage a pale shadow of the institution it was a few decades ago, and further implement the culture of death through the expansion of abortion and euthanasia.

Western academics are extremely romantic and naive about the European welfare state. They constantly invoke it as the prime example of "social justice" in the world today. They think a culture in the midst of committing demographic suicide is a model to be emulated.

My question is: "why would anyone want to imitate Europe?" Europe is a dithering, sick, old man and more like the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century than like the dynamic engine of enterprise and scientific advance it was at the end of the 18th century.

Victor Davis Hanson, at Real Clear Politics, invites us to give our heads a shake and see Europe for what it really is:

The European Union, like the 19th-century Congress of Vienna, can point to one achievement -- a general absence of war in Western Europe for more than 60 years. Otherwise, almost all its socialist promises of an equality of result are imploding before their eyes.

The higher taxes go, the more people cheat on them, the less revenue comes in. There are sometimes two prices in Italy (and often elsewhere in Europe) -- the official price that includes a high value-added tax that the unwary pay, and the negotiated, under-the-table, tax-free discount that the haggling shopper obtains.

Europe is essentially defenseless, as governments further trim defense budgets to keep shrinking spread-the-wealth entitlements alive. The French and British -- the continent's two premier military powers -- have been trying for nearly three months to defeat Muammar Gadhafi's ragtag nation of less than 7 million, itself rent by civil war. The ancestors (sic) of Wellington and Napoleon so far seem no match for Gadhafi or the Taliban. Both nations will soon be leaving Afghanistan in frustration.

Subsidized wind and solar power have not led to much of an increase in European electricity supplies, but they helped to make power bills soar. Highly taxed gas runs about $10 a gallon, ensuring tiny cars and dependence on mass transit. Central planners love the resulting state-subsidized, high-density European apartment living without garages, back yards or third bedrooms. Yet the recent Japanese tsunami and accompanying nuclear contamination have reminded European governments that their similarly fragile models of highly urbanized, highly concentrated living make them equally vulnerable to such disasters.

Popular culture may praise the use of the subway and train. But about every minute or two, some government grandee in a motorized entourage rushes through traffic as an escort of horn-blaring police forces traffic off to the side. A European technocratic class in limousines that runs government bureaus and international organizations -- for example, disgraced former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn -- lives like 18th-century aristocrats at Versailles as they mouth socialist platitudes.

Read it all here.

How about maybe waiting a decade or so and watching to see if there still is a Euro before jumping on the European bandwagon? My bet is that that will sound like a good idea to the majority of Americans on voting day in November 2012.

Why Do They Demonize Paul Ryan's Budget?

In its analysis of the intellectual foundations of Paul Ryan's budget, the Economist recently snifffed rather haughtily at his anti-Keynesian thrust. To question Keynes in certain circles is like questioning whether the ban on cannibalism in civilized societies is really a good thing. This got me to thinking about why this is so. Here is my theory.

Keynesian economic theory says that in an economic downturn the government should borrow money to spend on infastructure projects to put people to work and stimulate the economy. Then, when the business cycle turns upward and the economy is growing the government should pay off the accumulated debt by running budgetary surpluses. This cyclical debt is harmless and actually helpful in smoothing out the highs and lows of capitalism for ordinary people who would otherwise be battered by the boom and bust cycle necessary for any economy in which profit and loss provides the necessary discipline for growth and productivity (and the accompanying increase in the standard of living) to occur. All this sounds pretty good in theory. Of course, politics never happens just in theory.

Keynes proposed his theories in the 1930s and prior to that point, debt had been a dirty word for responsible business and government leaders. But as Keynes ideas caught on, debt became more and more thinkable and defensible.

The socialists smelled an opening here - a chink in the capitalist armor - and decided to exploit it. Since capitalists in the first half of the twentieth century were worried about how to contain Marxist radicalism and keep the working classes from revolution, and since deficit spending could help accomplish this goal, Keynes' theories were widely accepted.

Or, rather, they were half-accepted. At the same time as Keynes' ideas became popular the progressive elites who had been part of Wilson's "war socialism" were drooling about the prospects for implementing a Bismarkian welfare state idea in America. FDR's New Deal was the attempt to accomplish this goal by not letting a crisis go to waste. (In other words, use the crisis as cover to implement the agenda you had prior to the crisis.)

Keynes' argument for deficit spending in low economic times was just the rationale needed for creating huge entitlement programs for wealth redistribution during the Great Depression. Under the guise of "fighting" the Depression, the New Dealers used the Great Depression as cover to advance their essentially socialist welfare state ideas. It was creeping socialism without revolution.

The problem was that a key aspect of Keynes' theory was not implemented. That would be the part about the spending being only temporary. Keynes envisioned the government spending money on building bridges, paving roads, renovating schools etc. This type of spending could be turned off and on like a spigot. As soon as the economy recovered the government could turn off the spending spigot and increasing tax revenues due to increased economic activity would soon produce surpluses and allow the debt to be paid down.

But what if the spigot could never be turned off? What if the spending was not on bridges and roads but on social security and other entitlement programs that were designed to permanently redistribute wealth?

When the Republicans sound the alarm about the out of control budget deficits that threaten to destroy the US economy, what do the Democrats always say? They say that if you cut government spending during a fragile economic recovery you will harm the economy and increase unemployment. They act as if they were Keynesians and all these entitlement programs and unfunded pension liabilities due to irresponsible deals made by politicians in the past with public sector unions in order to get elected were just temporary spending designed to smooth out the recession.

But this is fundamentally dishonest. What Paul Ryan is on about has nothing to do with Keynesianism at all. He is not talking about temporary stimulus packages, but about on-going liabilities incurred by federal and state governments that are beyond the ability of government to fulfill. He is talking about the drive to ruinous, European-style, socialism under the cover of Keynesianism.

Paul Ryan is not against a modest welfare state with a basic social safety net for the needy; in fact, he wants to save the safety net by reforming and making sustainable the welfare state. What he is against is universal government programs designed, not to protect the needy, but to redistribute wealth according to the preferences of a cultural elite committed to a Marxist ideal of equality.

One of the ironies here is that Obama's plan will hurt the poor far more than Ryan's will because Obama's plan bankrupts the nation and that means the destruction, or drastic scaling back, of the social safety net. Ryan is trying to protect that safety net. Of course, the total spending goes down: that is the whole point. But the truly needy don't receive less; only the rich and the middle class do. It is not balancing the budget on the backs of the poor and the sick, but on the back of universality. And Democrats care more about universality than they do about the poor. It is the ideal that they worship.

The Democrats bang on about how the Republicans only care about helping the well to do. But the Republicans are asking: "Why should the millionaires and billionaires get welfare?" Instead of increasing their taxes and then exempting your cronies from paying those taxes via loopholes, why not reduce taxes and eliminate loopholes?

The Democrats want higher taxes so they can have government control of the lives of citizens. Helping the poor is just the excuse. It is that behind which they hide their true agenda. Their true agenda is social engineering and income redistribution in the name of romantic and Utopian ideals of equality. Paul Ryan's true sin in the eyes of the cultural elites is to challenge those sacred cows.

Conservative Ideas Work in Contemporary Cities: Liberal Ones Do Not

Here is a great article in the City journal by Heather MacDonald on the failure of liberal, welfare state, big government policies in America's cities between the 1960s and the 1990s and also on the major turn around in those same cities since the welfare reforms of the mid-1990s. She begins:

Conservative ideas are responsible for the two great urban-policy successes of the last quarter-century: the breathtaking drops in crime and in welfare dependency since the early 1990s. You’d never know it from members of the opinion elite, however, who have rarely recognized these successes, much less their provenance. So let’s recapitulate an epic battle about the foundations of social order, a battle that had not just a clear winner but also a clear loser: the liberal policy prescriptions for cities that many opinion makers and politicians still embrace. New York has been at the center of this battle because so many of the bad ideas that wreaked havoc on cities hatched there. Fortunately, so did many of the antidotes.

Liberal urban policy was based on several core assumptions. Number One: multigenerational poverty was the result of structural forces—above all, of rapacious capitalism and racism. It could never be the result of bad decision-making or a deficit of personal responsibility. Number Two: though men were still, alas, required for conceiving a child, they were purely optional for raising one. (Corollary: the role of illegitimacy in creating and perpetuating poverty could never be acknowledged.) Number Three: low-wage work was demeaning and pointless. It was better to receive a monthly welfare check than to labor at an entry-level job. Number Four: crime was an understandable and inevitable reaction to economic injustice and discrimination. (Corollary: the police could not lower crime; only government social programs and wealth-redistribution schemes could.) Together, these four conceits composed the most dangerous idea of all: that the bourgeois values of order, self-discipline, and respect for the law were decorative afterthoughts to prosperity, rather than its very precondition.

From the 1960s onward, liberal policymakers put these notions into practice, just as radical disorder was breaking out in American cities. In the name of economic justice, the welfare-rights movement, the brainchild of two New York academics, sought to eliminate all remaining stigma associated with the dole and to sign up as many people for welfare as possible. Within three years, welfare rolls in big cities had doubled. The urban riots of the 1960s heralded a decades-long outbreak of crime. A presidential commission responded to the growing anarchy in 1967 by recommending that prison sentences be shortened or eliminated and that the police focus on coordinating social services to offenders rather than on making arrests. The states complied, and the national incarceration rate dropped through the 1970s, while judges diverted offenders into social programs. Crime kept rising.

By the early 1990s, the fruits of this liberal monopoly over urban policy were in clear view. New York City homicides topped 2,000 in 1990. Drug dealers controlled the streets in the city’s poorest neighborhoods; children slept in bathtubs to avoid stray bullets from the dealers’ gun battles. Small businesses fled the city, unable to withstand the assaults on their employees and the constant break-ins. Manhattanites posted pathetic little NO RADIO signs in their cars, hoping for mercy from the circumambient thieves. The national welfare caseload was up fivefold, as was the nation’s illegitimacy rate. In New York City, one in seven residents was on welfare.

The failure of liberal, welfare-state policies is obvious. But do conservative emphases on individual responsibility, the dignity of even low-paid work, family values and law and order actually work any better? The answer is that the evidence is in and the debate is over. The conservative approach works.

President Bill Clinton, to his credit, ignored these doomsayers and in 1996 ended the lifetime welfare entitlement. The same women who, the advocates had said, were incapable of working or were unwanted by the economy entered the workforce in droves. The welfare rolls dropped 66 percent, and black child poverty experienced its greatest drop in history. In New York City, where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had started asking people to go to work a year before federal welfare reform passed, the welfare rolls have dropped 70 percent. New York now has the lowest child poverty rate of the eight largest U.S. cities. . .

However significant the rout of the poverty-industrial complex, New York’s demolition of conventional thinking about crime was even more momentous. Since 1990, New York has experienced the largest and longest sustained drop in street crime of any big city in the developed world. In less than a generation, many major felonies have fallen 80 percent or more. New York did this by rejecting everything that the criminology and social-work professions counseled about crime. Police Chief William Bratton announced in 1994 that the police, not some big-government welfare program, would lower crime by 10 percent in just one year. He not only met his goal, he bested it—by ruthlessly holding precinct commanders accountable for the safety of their beats, by the rigorous analysis of crime data, and by empowering street cops to intervene in suspicious behavior before a crime actually happened.

Just as the liberal philosophy of exempting the poor from bourgeois standards of behavior set up a vicious cycle of fatherlessness, crime, and dependency, the conservative philosophy of universal standards set up a virtuous cycle of urban renovation. With crime in free fall across New York in the 1990s, the tourism and hospitality industries boomed, triggering demand for the low-skilled welfare mothers whom welfare reform was nudging into the workplace. Businesses moved back into formerly violence-plagued areas, creating more jobs. Neighborhoods were transformed.

Read it all here.

Is New York City a Utopia? No, but that is not the criterion conservaives use for evaluating social policy. That is the liberal goal. For conservatives, what matters is that the situation is actually better! For liberals that is irrelevant because conservatives aren't trying for Utopian solutions so their aspirations are not as high and in the politics of good intentions this is all that matters. Facts are irrelevant and incremental progress is despised. Conservatives know that Utopia is a pipe dream and so are fixated on making things a bit better than they were and so are much more useful in the real world than the left-wing ideologues.

A Brief Meditation on Charity: In Continuation of the Last Post

I think we are hopelessly muddled up in thinking about charity today. This one word is shot through with contradictions and used in so many different ways that nobody knows what it means anymore.

To begin: charity is good. Charity is those with enough sharing with those in need. This is a virtue and it is good for both the giver (who is liberated from the vice of greed by sharing) and for the recipient (who has a pressing physical need like hunger met which would otherwise go unmet). Charity of this sort ought to produce the virtue of gratitude in the recipient as well as the virtue of generosity in the giver.

But when a system encourages people to become dependent on charity, then it is attacking human dignity. To come to rely on charity when one could do something else destroys self-respect, decreases initiative and leads to self-loathing. So to accept charity when one does not need charity is destructive of one's character. And to give charity when it is not needed is to place oneself in a position of patronage and power over the recipients. It is to assume a parental role toward them that infantilizes them and disempowers them.

So charity is a good thing when it is needed because of unavoidable circumstances beyond the control of the recipient and when its intention is the short-term relief of real, physical needs that would not otherwise be met. But when charity is systematized into the modern welfare state so that entire underclass of dependents is created and people are locked into multi-generational poverty and dependency, then what we have is the creation of a monster state lording it over its subjects through its bureaucracy.

Getting people off welfare, not preserving, making permanent and expanding the welfare state, should be the goal of all those who care about human dignity and actual poor people. The socialist critique of capitalism cannot be that it does not foster the welfare state; that is its strength not its weakness. Socialism does not occupy the moral high ground here.

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.

The Death of God and the Death of Man

Samuel Gregg of The Acton Institute has a good analysis of why democracy can be incompatible with liberty in "Fatal Attraction: Democracy and the Welfare State" published at Public Discourse. It all depends on whether the democracy is restrained by virtue in the people or not. He begins with a summary of the increasingly difficult situation in Europe:

A week, it is often said, is a long time in politics. Much, however, can change in a year. Only a short while ago some European politicians were touting the European social model’s superiority over what many continental Europeans deride as “Anglo-Saxon capitalism.” Now, however, governments across Europe are scrambling to avoid the fate of Greece. Moreover, they are doing so by contemplating—and, in some cases, implementing—the hitherto unthinkable: reducing their budget deficits by diminishing the expansive welfare states to which many Europeans have long been accustomed.

In doing so, these governments are finally acknowledging a truth initially obscured by the crisis of the euro: that for all the disarray generated by the euro’s recent tribulations, Europe’s economic woes have more systematic causes.

One cause is several decades of low economic growth. As the Czech president Václav Klaus recently observed, “average annual economic growth in the eurozone countries was 3.4 percent in the 1970s, 2.4 percent in the 1980s, 2.2 percent in the 1990s and only 1.1 percent from 2001 to 2009.” “A similar slowdown,” Klaus added, “has not occurred anywhere else in the world.”

A second problem is Europe’s profound demographic decline. On current projections, for example, Spain’s over-65 population is set to increase from its present level of 17 percent to 25 percent by 2030. That means fewer people working to support growing numbers of pensioners.

When low economic growth and declining demography are combined with European welfare states—generous state-provided health and unemployment insurance; early retirement and liberal state pensions; large public sector employment; legislation that emphasizes job security over labor market flexibility—something eventually has to give. Greece has reached that point. The rest of Europe is struggling to avoid following Greece into the abyss.

Gregg notes de Tocqueville's warning about "common opinion" being the dominant power in democracies.

The problem, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America, is that public opinion, especially what he called “common opinion,” is “the dominant power” in democracies. The contemporary French philosopher Pierre Manent goes even further to claim that in democracies “it is not dogma that comprises shared opinion; it is shared opinion that is dogma.” It follows that if enough people want expansive welfare programs in a democracy, the capacity for politicians to oppose, for example, the desire of 51 percent of the population to progressively loot the other 49 percent, is limited. To resist is to court electoral rejection or, as we have seen, rioters running amok in the streets of Athens.

Various constitutional remedies have been proposed, as Gregg notes, but they cannot restrain the unbearable temptation that is posed to politicians by the prospect of expanding the welfare state:

The bartering of privileges and grants to different groups is thus almost inevitable in a democracy if a government wants to retain its coalition of support. In these circumstances, expanding the welfare state to reward particular adherents is a difficult temptation to resist. As Röpke commented: “To expand the welfare state is not only easy but it is also one of the surest means for the demagogue to win votes and political influence, and it is for all of us the most ordinary temptation to gain, at no cost to ourselves, a reputation for generosity and kindness.”

But Gregg does not conclude that democracy must be given up in order for the welfare state to be reigned in before it drags the entire country down into chaos, rioting and violence. How can it be done?

The beginning of a proper response is to recognize that a democracy’s ability to resist the long slouch towards the soft despotism of the welfare state requires two things. The first is to shift the incentives for economic mobility and security so that they lie in the private sector rather than in becoming a recipient of state largesse. This task is very difficult when much of the population already enjoys some measure of state income. Yet it is dwarfed by the immensity of the second challenge: developing a moral and political culture which underscores the undesirability of politicians and citizens using the state to live at others’ expense.

The second challenge named by Gregg is the key. In my opinion, Europe's post-Christian secularism is infantile and enervating; it is insufficient as the basis for a culture of dynamism and life. But without a religious soul, the body politic is sick unto death and this is Europe's dilemma: repent or die - quite literally.

Gregg is quite right to affirm that the EU need not repeat the long, slow, sad, decline of the old USSR. There are democratic alternatives to decline and we see them in the contemporary United States of America, where Christianity is still showing signs of life and vigor. The most important commonality between the old USSR and the contemporary EU is one that most economists and political theorists dismiss as irrelevant, but which is actually of crucial importance: their atheism. John Paul II knew that economics and politics follow culture and that the Marxists were wrong to think it was the other way round.

Europe's problem is that it lies in the grip of the culture of death and that belief the death of God always leads to the death of man.

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.

A Question We Must Answer If We Want to Prevent Socialist Stagnation and Tyranny

Jonah Goldberg asks, and proposes the beginning of an answer to, this question in a post entitled: "In a Welfare State, How Much is 'Enough'?" at the National Review Online.

Indeed, the mess we have today is merely the natural result of a century-long battle over the size of government. When it comes to the welfare state, liberals want more, conservatives want less. It seems that nobody ever talks about “enough.”

Except that’s not entirely true. Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) offered an alternative vision of government in his famous “Roadmap.” It was, in the words of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, a blueprint for a “conservative welfare state.” The idea was that the truly needy would be taken care of because they are truly needy, but middle-class entitlements would be scaled back for two simple reasons: 1) We cannot afford them, and 2) excessive government meddling in areas such as health care increases costs and wastes money.

Ryan’s blueprint was denounced by liberals as too stingy and largely ignored by much of the Republican leadership, who were happy to just say no to Obama’s plans without offering voters anything serious to say yes to.

William Voegeli, a scholar of impeccable conservative credentials, has joined Ryan’s battle in his book Never Enough, a searing indictment of what he calls the Hundred Years’ War between the party of more and the party of less. Voegeli argues that American voters (including most Republicans) will never fully eradicate the welfare state, because they don’t want to. Therefore, conservatives should make peace with the idea that the federal government should help the truly needy, while rejecting both the sorts of middle- and upper-class entitlements that are bankrupting the country and the kind of government “dole” that breeds bad habits among the poor and able-bodied.

Purist libertarians who see in this argument merely a surrender to liberalism should at least acknowledge that liberals would denounce any suggestion of means testing America’s safety net as cruel cutbacks and a violation of FDR’s “vision,” and that many voters would agree with them. Moreover, the current strategy hasn’t worked. We’ve had a century of nearly uninterrupted growth in the welfare state, even under Ronald Reagan. That alone recommends a new strategy.

Consider Social Security. Liberals are absolutely committed to the idea that everybody should be in the same creaky retirement system. They insist that middle- and upper-class voters must be bribed to support the poor. Warren Buffett gets a Social Security check to ensure everyone does. In fairness, some liberals also claim that a universal entitlement binds us together as a nation. The former claim is cynical, the latter poetic nonsense.

Governments do not generate wealth; they can merely distribute it. The challenge for both liberals and conservatives is simply to define how much distribution is “enough.” What would an acceptable safety net look like? Who should be taken care of by taxpayers and for how long? Paul Ryan offered an answer to that question, and liberals scoffed because they reject the question. There’s no such thing as enough, as far as they’re concerned.

The really important point here is that liberals reject the question "How much is enough?" Now, first of all, real liberals wouldn't reject this question. Actually, this question separates the liberals from the socialists. Only socialists would reject this question and the fact that many who call themselves liberals or who are called liberals by others would reject this question shows that they are not really liberals. They just find the label "socialist" too toxic in the American context and so they avoid it for propaganda reasons. But in terms of the actual content of their political philosophy, the only reason to reject the question "How much is enough?" is because you really are committed to equality of incomes in society as your bottom line priority. And that is socialism.

It is possible to care about the poor and to want to lift them out of poverty without being a socialist. Let us consider two scenarios:

Scenario #1 The income of the poor goes up by 100% over a decade and nobody is now living under the poverty line as defined at the beginning of the decade. The income of the richest 10% of the population has seen its income skyrocket by 1000% during the same period.

Scenario #2 The income of the poor goes up by 20% over a decade and only 50% of those living under the poverty line at the beginning of the decade are still living under the poverty line. The richest 10% of the population has seen its income decline by 50% during the same period.

Only a socialist would say that the second scenario is better than the first one and socialist policies are designed to lead to the scenarios more like the second than the first one. Now ask yourself the question: "If I were a poor person which scenario would I prefer?" Only the first scenario guarantees that you will be above the poverty line at the end of the decade and the first scenario means your income is likely to go up more in absolute terms. Who really thinks that actual, living, breathing poor people would opt for the second scenario?

Those who prefer the second scenario are typically middle and upper-class people in the grip of a romantic, revolutionary, Utopian vision. And this is why socialists need to engage in so much propaganda and manipulation in order to sell their vision to the working class only to see the working class so often drift off to vote conservative (like blue collar workers did for Reagan etc.). This is what causes anguished and tortured bouts of "analysis" and "critique" trying to explain why workers supposedly vote "against their own interests." The simpler explanation (remember Ockham's Razor) is that they recognize that socialism is not in their best interests.

The question Goldberg raises and Congressman Paul Ryan is trying to discuss like an adult is absolutely the right question. How much of a safety net for the truly needy should we have in place and how will it be paid for? Ryan is a voice in the wilderness talking about means tests and targeting benefits to those who actually need them, rather than just assuming that the State can afford endlessly increasing financial support programs for all citizens forever. What is going on in Greece and Europe as a whole today shows that this is a pipe dream.

But this pipe dream of the ever-expanding welfare state where the bills never come due is sold as propaganda by socialist in order to fool people into voting for them. It is essentially a form of temptation. But once the socialists gain power, their true philosophy will become visible and living standards will decline and poverty will increase - even as the goal of equality is attained.

If the European crisis brings about a socialist European super state it will be a humanitarian disaster of world historical significance. If you want to visualize concretely what it will mean, dig out some old newsreel footage of breadlines in Moscow and recall Solzhenitsyn's characterizations of the Soviet empire as a giant slave state. We don't even need to talk about the gulag necessary to enforce compliance with socialist totalitarianism.

Either you are willing to come to grips with the question: "How much is enough?" or you head down a road that leads to food shortages, poverty and the gulag. That is how important this discussion is.

Morality, Not Money, is the Social Glue that Holds Society Together

Ed West has some extremely lucid comments on the failures of New Labour in his blog post today with the intriguing title: "I can see the attraction of Old Labour. At least they built nukes and believed in Britain." After writing about the evaporation of the social conservatism that characterized the post-war Labour Party, he writes:

"The fatal weakness of today’s Left – both New Labour and the Liberal Democrats – is that they want both personal freedom and solidarity. They want the freedom to have no-fault divorces and stigma-free children out of wedlock, to drink and take drugs at will, swear, misbehave, and be at liberty to spend and consume as much as they want without judgment – it is their “right” after all – without accepting the accompanying social pathologies.

A bohemian lifestyle is generally harmless for the wealthy, educated and mentally strong, but it’s devastating for the poor. Lifestyle freedom, the European Left’s core philosophy, creates perhaps even more inequality than economic freedom, the European Right’s core idea. Which is why, without the social solidarity which social conservatism brings, you cannot just buy equality through welfare spending or, as Nick Clegg suggested last night, extra school tuition for the poorest.

We already spend a fortune on trying to educate the underclass, on top of various other social leveling projects, to no effect. Gordon Brown has spent enormous amounts of other people’s money on the poorest 10 per cent, and yet inequality is greater than ever. You can’t fix a broken society like that because society is glued together by morality, not money."

Read the rest here.

Lifestyle freedom (aka the sexual revolution) is a corrosive acid that is incompatible with just about any social philosophy, be it capitalist, socialist, Fabian, communitarian or whatever. The attempt to staunch the bleeding with welfare checks fails miserably and yet New Labour types in the UK, the NDP in Canada and the (currently dominant) left-wing of the Democratic Party in the US, have no other solution.

The whole "let us raise taxes one more time and institute one more entitlement program, just one more, and there will be no more poor among us" meme is getting so old. Time and time again the weflare state advocates have tried to prove our Lord wrong, yet his words have been true for 2000 years and will be true for 2000 more: "The poor you will have with you always."

It is like trying to fill a tub of water with a drain at one end and a spout at the other. The drain at one end is wide open (the lifestyle freedom drain) and the spout (welfare programs) at the other end is turned on. New Labour's policy is to turn the spout on higher and faster. The problem is that if the drain is not ever going to be plugged, the money will eventually run out. It has run out for Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland and it is quickly running out for the UK and the European Union as a whole.

Barack Obama got elected on the platform of a centrist, pragmatic approach to governing a center-right country because the voters were so mesmerized by the opportunity to elect an African American that they didn't notice his social welfare bias. Gordon Brown is running on opening the spout even further and partying until the Repro Man comes, while pretending that there will never be a day of reckoning.

Those who want equality will have to face up sooner or later that, without morality, their dreams are unrealizable.

Wallis versus Beck on Social Justice

Stu Burguiere, executive producer of the Glenn Beck Show, defends Beck against Jim Wallis' accusations in the Washington Post in an article entitled: "What Glenn Beck Meant About Social Justice." Here is an excerpt:

"Like everyone else in America, Glenn Beck thinks "social justice" ---if its defined as charitable outreach to the poor----is a good idea. He supports it, he believes in it, he does it.

So, what's the problem? I mean, "social justice" seems like such an innocuous phrase, right? It paints a picture of fairness. I guess that's why Father Charles Coughlin used it when naming his National Union for Social Justice and his publication Social Justice Weekly. Coughlin was an anti-Semitic religious broadcaster in the 1930s, and he used the banner of social justice to attack capitalism, warn of Jewish plots against "Christian civilization", and to promote his adoration for Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini.

This is part of the information Glenn revealed in a special TV show about American extremism of the 20th century. In the context of promoting that special, he began talking about how the far left was once again using this terminology to politicize churches. The specific example he named was Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

He told his listeners that if they were in a church that preaches Jeremiah Wright-style social justice, they should leave--or at least get educated on what exactly that means. It took him all of eight seconds to clarify the type of church he was speaking of, but that was long enough for most in the media to end the transcript.

Suddenly, Glenn was accused of attacking the central tenets of the bible, because he supposedly believed that any church that wants to help the poor should be immediately evacuated. This absurd narrative is mainly the product of Rev. Jim Wallis.

To restate the obvious, some simply use the term "social justice" as a substitute for "outreach to the poor." This is not the kind of "social justice" Glenn was talking about. The fact that this term has been utilized for purposes other than good Christian charity is well documented. One scholar explained it quite clearly: "it is true that term [has] been used by the right and the left for all kinds of ideological purposes that aren't necessarily the purposes of Christ." That scholar was Jim Wallis.

Read the rest here.

The issue between Beck and Wallis is not whether Christians (and all decent people) should give to charity. Everyone agrees we should.

But it is one thing to advocates charity and quite another to despise it as too little and too ineffective. Wallis advocates government assuming the power to confiscate everybody's income and redistribute it according to the dogma of equality of outcomes as administered by a bureaucratic class of experts. Beck says that people have a moral obligation to give to the poor. Wallis says they have a moral obligation to vote for political parties that will redistribute wealth by coercion. So it is really a "Private Charity versus Social Democracy" debate.

Do we only have "social justice" when we have a social democracy in which the income is redistributed by the government so that everyone is basically equal economically regardless of how productive each one is? If that is social justice, then Beck opposes it and so most Americans.

And so do most Christians, because while we follow Jesus' teaching and render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, we don't believe that everything belongs to Caesar. Only those who have sold out to Caesar believe that.

The Welfare State and the Pax Americana

In January, I predicted that by the end of this year the idea of a European-style Value Added Tax would be under discussion by the Obama administration. Well, here is a story by Niles Gardner in which the beginnings of that debate may be discerned.

The relentless drive by the Obama administration to undercut economic freedom in the United States continued yesterday with Paul Volcker’s call for the possible introduction of European-style value-added taxes as well as energy or carbon taxes. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chief, is currently the most powerful economic adviser to the president after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and sits as the chairman of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

This is not empty, throw away rhetoric, but a call to arms by an aggressively interventionist and uncompromisingly left-wing US administration that is actively seeking to refashion the United States in the image of the European Union, both in terms of foreign and economic policies.

Volcker made the remarks at the New York Historical Society, and his comments were picked up here by Reuters:

In addition to regulatory reform, Volcker said lawmakers would likely have to make some tough choices in the coming years to bring U.S. deficits under control and prevent inflationary pressure from building.

While highly unpopular, he said the United States should consider raising taxes and consider introducing a European-style value-added tax and perhaps an energy or carbon tax.

The value-added tax “was not as toxic an idea” as it has been in the past, he said, adding it may be necessary to fund entitlement costs and decrease U.S. deficits.

“If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes,” he said.

By building up staggering levels of debt – projected to rise by $12 trillion over the next decade according to the Congressional Budget Office – through a massive expansion of government spending, including universal health care, the Obama administration is digging itself into a massive hole with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Read the rest here.

We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the "pax Americana," which has lasted from the end of World War II until now. After the war American took over from the exhausted British Empire the task of policing the world and ensuring opportunities for trade and travel. The containment and eventual defeat of Communism was an integral element in this endeavor.

The creation of a European-style social democracy in the US is Obama's goal, but it is incompatible with the levels of military spending required to maintain the pax Americana. Europe (and Canada) can only have the social welfare state it has only because of low military spending and even then it looks like the EU may be entering a period of reckoning for overspending as the default crisis in Greece threatens to spread.

Only because America has been keeping Europe safe has Europe been able to direct so much government spending to entitlement programs for the middle class, as well as the poor. The smug sense of moral superiority many Europeans have toward the US is pretty disgusting. Once Iranian nuclear missiles with a range that enables them to reach Europe are trained on them, and the implications of Obama's reversion to pre-World War I style isolationism sinks in, the more perceptive among them may well end up pining for the good old days when "Cowboy George" paid the freight for their hedonistic lifestyle.

Obama's agenda must be derailed in November for the good of the whole world. Fortunately, the prospects for the Republicans taking control of the House and making strong gains in the Senate continue to be good.

The Welfare State and Secularization

This article by W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia offers an explanation for why secularism is rising in America. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123690880933515111.html

The last bastion of high church attendance and influence of Christianity on public life, America has, for the last century or so, resisted the trends toward secularization in the rest of Western culture, especially Europe. However, he quotes a new study that shows that the number of Americans who claim no religion now stands at 15%, up from 8% in 1990 and 2% in 1962. Religious service attendance in the 25-41 age group is now about 25%, down from 33% in the early 1970's, according to Robert Wuthrow.

Wilcox names two explanations for the decline and why it is likely to accelerate. First, he mentions the decline in marriage. Increasing numbers of young adults are postponing or avoiding marriage and childbearing and nothing gets people out to church like having a family.

The other factor that he thinks will accelarate the trend in future is the drastic expansion of the welfare state under Obama. The 2010 budget will bring government spending to about 40% of the GNP, within hailing distance of the European average of 46%. According to Wilcox, "The European experience suggests that the growth of the welfare state goes hand in hand with declines in personal religiosity." Wilcox then explains:

"A recent study of 33 countries by Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde found an inverse relationship between religious observance and welfare spending. Countries with larger welfare states, such as Sweden, Norway and Denmark, had markedly lower levels of religious attendance, affiliation and trust in God than countries with a history of limited government, such as the U.S., the Philippines and Brazil. Public spending amounts to more than one half of the GDP in Sweden, where only 4% of the population regularly attends church. By contrast, public spending amounts to 18% of the Philippines' GDP, and 68% of Filipinos regularly attend church."

I think this is an accurate statement of the empirical facts. Although Wilcox does not mention the North versus South disparity in rates of secularization, the general model holds. The question is why is this the case? Wilcox proposes the following explanation:

"A successful Obama revolution providing cradle-to-career education and cradle-to-grave health care would reduce the odds that Americans would turn to their local religious congregations and fellow believers for economic, social, emotional and spiritual aid. Fewer Americans would also be likely to feel obliged to help their fellow citizens through local churches and charities."

Now there is something in this assessment, but I think it is too pragmatic and rational. It portrays people as attending church as a rational, economic calculation and that seems much too reductionistic as an explanation for a complex human behaviour like religious observance. Yet, this explanation, it seems to me, does go at least part way to explaining the decline of civil society in general in the welfare state, insofar as altruism is one of the prime motivating factors for participation in civil society. There is something to the "Let the government do it" attitude, especially if people perceive that they are being taxed heavily.

But we could also look at it from a slightly different angle and say that the welfare state cultivates in individuals a sense of entitlement and security that makes for self-sufficiency. This self-sufficiency is highly prized in liberal individualist society and is often called "empowerment." It is seen as a good, even though it leads to selfishness and a loss of community.

What I'm wondering is if this sense of security fostered by the welfare state could be viewed as a personal attitude similar to what the Bible means by riches or wealth. I know that there are many people in Canada or the US who are much richer than those on government assistance of one form or another, yet in comparison to over two billion global neighbours these people are extremely rich. The question is whether or not this kind of economic security qualifies as being rich in biblical terms. If so, consider the following verses:

"The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life's worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature." (Lk. 8:14)

"No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money." (Lk. 16:13)

"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. " (I Tim. 6:10)

"Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you." (Heb. 13:5)

Now, I realize that we are used to applying these verese to the wealthiest segment of any given society and implicit in that move is the covert denial that most of us are, ourselves, wealthy. This seems to be to be a rather pernicious little self-deception. I can imagine a memo from Screwtape instructing his protege to attempt to convince as many people in modern Western culture that they are, in fact, poor. At first, he might advise, get them to think they are "relatively" poor and then later quietly drop the "relatively."

It seems to me that we were not placed on this earth to vegetate, fornicate and prevaricate, but rather to struggle to earn an honest living, marry and raise children and be truthful about our financial status. It is a temptation to believe that we are poor, when we actually are rich. And it is a temptation to put our trust in the State for the provision of our needs instead of praying "Our Father . . give us this day our daily bread."

In this way, secularization is surely aided and abetted by the welfare state. But it is not merely a matter of not going to church for selfish motivations that were less than admirable reasons to go in the first place. It is far more serious than that. It is a matter of letting the Welfare State replace God and imagining ourselves as poor and hard done by when in reality we are greatly blessed. The irony is that the more we are blessed economically, the easier it is to be damned spiritually. Is it any wonder that the Bible as a whole is profoundly ambivalent about money and riches?