From The Telegraph:
Has anyone noticed, either, that what we used to call the working class has shrunk? Not merely because, as surveys tell us, so many now think of themselves as “middle-class”, but because something called the respectable working class has almost died out. What sociologists used to call the working class does not now usually work at all, but is sustained by the welfare state. Its supposed family units are not as the rest of us might define the term. It lapses routinely into criminality and lives in largely self-inflicted squalor. It has low educational attainment and is bereft of ambition. It is what we now call the underclass.
We have an underclass because we pay to have one. I do not mean that to be a glib remark, from which it could be inferred that, if we were to stop paying for one, it would magically disappear. What I mean is that 60 years of welfarism, far from raising people out of poverty and of the vices that sometimes (but not inevitably) go with it, has simply trapped them there. Welfarism has smashed the traditional, and vital, family unit. The state readily takes responsibility for families if those who should be running them decide, in part or in whole, to abdicate it. The huge outlay of money that allows this to happen is represented by politicians - and not exclusively those of the Left - as a great act of humanity and philanthropy…
…That welfarism should allow people to pass their duties to the state was certainly not envisaged by Beveridge when he drew up his blueprint for a welfare system in 1942. As a Liberal of the best sort, Beveridge saw his job as to design a safety net for those who, in distressing scenes in the 1920s and 1930s, had lived in dire poverty owing to mismanagement of the world’s main economies after the First World War. The Attlee government interpreted Beveridge differently, and ensured that welfare instead would provide a career structure for those who chose not to work, or not to provide for their families.
That was bad enough; but real toxicity has been created by combining this destructive profligacy with a liberal experiment in criminal justice that has now utterly failed, and with the sacrifice of our state education system on the altar of Marxism. Given how many of our young grow up without any moral example in their lives, without discipline or serious learning at school, and in the knowledge that the police will not confront them or, if they do, that the courts have little power to punish, it is small wonder we have pockets of lethal anarchy throughout the green and pleasant land…
…Many of the “solutions” to our social problems that have been trotted out since Rhys Jones was killed are right. Given the mess we have allowed to be made, a dose of authoritarianism is needed: more police being more vigilant, catching more criminals and putting them in more prisons.
But our politicians remain too cowardly to implement the prescription. The grammar schools that once helped the poor out of poverty are reviled even by the leader of the Conservative Party, who went to Eton. The scaling down of benefits to the undeserving poor, hand-in-hand with a drive to help people into work and to take responsibility for themselves and their own, is too terrifying for any political party to contemplate.
Collectivism is a slippery slope.
Expansive central planning projects that promise to help people more often do the opposite. The government creates a program to help indigent people, creating more indigent people in the process, thus increasing the demand for programs to help indigent people - repeat until society implodes (e.g. Zimbabwe, USSR, Red China, North Korea, Cambodia…)
These programs can easily emerge from democratic processes since in the short term they are often so popular. Thus many European democracies that had freer economies than the US after WWII have slid into socialist stupor.
How can democracies protect themselves? - a strong constitutional foundation. Governments must not be permitted to claim limitless authority simply because they are elected. Basic principles - individual rights, protection from coercion, enforcement of contracts, defense of property rights - must be upheld regardless what some temporary majority may vote for.
Update 8/29/07:
On a related note, from WF Buckley Jr. this morning:
…democracy, provoked, can act outside the bounds of reason. It was an old saw seventy years ago that the impoverished farmer in the Soviet Union next door to the successful farmer worked not to replicate the practices of his neighbor, but to urge the state to confiscate his neighbor’s harvest. Venezuela’s hatred of the United States generates the equivalent of calls to confiscate the successful harvest.
In certain quarters in Venezuela the hatred of the superpower to the north can be all consuming. When Hugo Chavez, a demagogue of surrealistic extremes, came along, many saw a racy attractiveness in the totality of his iconoclasm. In 2002, the United States, we have been given to believe, had a hand in an attempt to dethrone Chavez. But it didn’t work, and the result of it was a democratic reelection in which Hugo Chavez got a higher percentage of the vote than Abraham Lincoln did when he ran for a second term.
What will happen now?
What always happens when policies are set in flat collision with reality. Venezuelans will become poorer, the political scene will close its door on freedom of the press, and some day down the line, the people will be rescued from the exorbitant lengths to which, acting on democratic license, they took themselves.
