Among various unwanted truths that grown-ups of the Western world have to contend with these days, here’s one that doesn’t get nearly the traction it deserves: The days of the modern welfare state look to be numbered.
Yet it’s true. Even the most redistributive president in history can’t change the laws of arithmetic. As can be seen most recently in Jonathan V. Last’s book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, the song of demographic unsustainability remains the same on both sides of the Atlantic. From Nicosia to Athens, London to Washington, D.C., the benefits promised to seniors and others before Western people stopped having babies will be shouldered in the years to come by a shrinking cadre of younger taxpayers. Nor is the discrepancy just some accounting shortfall to be finessed. As British psychiatrist and pundit Theodore Dalrymple once noted, this crisis is system-wide, “civilizational.”
Two weeks ago, for instance, two news items independently offered clear windows onto different parts of the scene. In the New York Times, a harrowing front page story entitled “More Children in Greece Start To Go Hungry” showed what can happen when an economy in free-fall meets the highest unemployment rates in Europe (27 percent): More Greek youngsters underfed and malnourished; garbage-picking outside elementary schools; and an overall level of “food insecurity” that, according to one expert, rivals that in parts of Africa. And though “experts” can be expected to overstate, Greece, it helps to remember, is a country in the EU.
On the same day, in the Washington Post, columnist George Will used recent work by Hudson Institute scholar Christopher DeMuth to examine the political sausage factory that could push America toward a Grecian future.....
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