A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Plows Into Welfare Checks

Mark Steyn is consistently the most interesting columnist out there.  In his latest effort, Steyn (writing in Canada's Macleans magazine), addresses some of the root causes for Europe's current economic and cultural woes.

Right now, Europe mostly needs protection from itself, and its worst inclinations:

“With low growth, low birth rates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle.”

The Times hits all the Steynian themes, including the Continent as defense-welfare queen:
“Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella.”

Absolved from having to pay for their own defense, Continentals, like Canadians, beat their swords into welfare checks, and erected vast cradle-to-grave social entitlements. Even under the U.S. security umbrella, they proved unsustainable. Why? Because Europeans stopped breeding. And, even with unprecedented levels of immigration, they’ve been unable to halt population decline.

Four years ago Steyn wrote the most important book of the decade, America Alone, and in it he identified the unsustainable economic models that European countries had built for themselves since WWII.  He also identified the disturbing demographic trends in Europe that show a continent disinterested not only in preserving the ideas, ideals, and values that founded Western civilization, but in preserving their own lineage and heritage.

Steyn continues:

In the U.S., meanwhile, Obama’s courtiers are beginning to muse about the introduction of an EU-style “VAT,” which the locals generally translate as a “national sales tax.” VAT stands for “value-added tax,” because you’re taxing the value that is added to a product in the course of its path to market. But I find myself ruminating on “value” in a more basic sense. Advanced social democracies don’t need a value-added tax; they need a value-added life. “The Europe that protects” may, indeed, protect you from the vicissitudes of fate but it also disconnects you from the primary impulses of life. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray last year. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors—even more to the lives of janitors—as it does to the lives of CEOs.”

Capitalists sometimes carelessly give the impression that theirs is a materialistic argument. But anti-capitalists do not want for material comforts—you go to the poorest part of town and you see plenty of cellphones and plasma TVs. And Eutopia is distinguished mainly by a lethargic hedonism: shorter working hours, longer vacations, earlier retirements, bigger benefits. What do they do with all that free time? Write operas? Paint pictures? Not so’s you’d notice. Life is a matter of passing the time—or, indeed, of holding the moment: “Linger awhile, how fair thou art,” in the words of Goethe’s Faust, which would make a fine epitaph for the European Union.

How fair thou hast been—but only for the moment, and the moment is passing. Europe’s economic crisis is a mere symptom of its existential crisis: what is life for? What gives it meaning? Post-Christian, post-national, post-modern Europe has no answer to that question, and so it has 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees, and wonders why the small band of workers in between them can’t make the math add up. It’s striking that both the chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the minister for families, Kristina Schroeder, who announced the latest grim statistics, are themselves childless women. Germany has one of the oldest ages of “family formation” in the developed world, and once you lose the habit, it’s hard to re-acquire it.

I am all for seriously natalist tax regimes, not so much because they leave more money in people’s pockets but because they leave more responsibility in there. But that’s the bottom line—not introducing a new entitlement but instilling in people for whom life is a diversion a sense of purpose larger than themselves: what’s it all about, Alfie? Cradle-to-grave nanny-state “protection”? Government security does not in and of itself make for a satisfying, purposeful life: indeed, the University of Michigan and other studies suggest quite the opposite—that welfare makes one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one’s family.

Limited government, fiscal (and personal) responsibility, "If a man will not work, he will not eat", and national defense are some of the core principles that made America different than even our democratic cousins in Europe.  We succeeded because of these things, not in spite of them, as liberals from Brussels to Berkley would try and have you believe.  The welfare state is unsustainable.  For it to "work", fewer and fewer people (those evil "rich") have to pay more and more for other people to live the "adequate" lifestyles government bureaucrats and politicians deem adequate.  It is sheer madness...but it sounds nice and compassionate, so many of us go along with it.

Mr. Steyn closes out his piece with a bang:

The problem isn’t that Greece is the sick man of Europe, but that Germany is—and, when the economic engine of a continent no longer has enough folks to shovel the coal in, that puts a huge question mark over Ireland, Sweden, Slovenia and beyond.

This is the crisis of our times, and the first Western nation to figure out a way around it will have a huge advantage in the decades to come. When Barack Obama started redistributing American wealth, a lot of readers dusted off Mrs. Thatcher’s bon mot: “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” But European social democracy has taken it to the next level: they’ve run out of other people, period.

Here's the first of a five-part interview at National Review Online with Mark about his book, America Alone:

Buy this book!!!