The New Road to Serfdom by Daniel Hannan

Author:Daniel Hannan [Hannan, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-199476-0
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1989-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

DON’T EUROPEANIZE SOCIETY

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Europeans and Americans approach social policy from different perspectives. In Europe, government action is considered morally preferable to individual benevolence. The former allows poor people to claim an entitlement that is theirs by right. The latter demeans them by obliging them to take charity.

The United States, until very recently at any rate, has remained faithful to what I identified in chapter 1 as the Miltonian vision of liberty: the belief that virtue cannot be coerced. Thus, choosing to make a donation is meritorious, whereas having your contribution forcibly taken from you through taxation and spent on your behalf robs you of the opportunity to have acted morally.

The European conception, of course, can easily descend into equating decency with high taxes. It can also make the related mistake of assuming that the level of welfare payments is the measure of a society’s collective humanity.

Both assumptions are flawed. I hope I don’t need to persuade readers that private philanthropy is generally more efficient than taxation, as well as morally preferable. Equally, though, the poor suffer from the assumption that what they need is larger handouts.

Poverty is not simply an absence of wealth. It is bound up with a series of other factors: family breakdown, substance abuse, poor educational qualifications, low expectations. It follows that you do not address the problem of poverty by giving money to the poor. To take an extreme example, giving $1,000 to a drug addict is not, in the long term, going to make him better off. Poverty is best solved holistically, by tackling its contributory conditions.

Sadly, in Europe, the poor generally have been left to the left, with consequences that, while inconvenient to the taxpayer, are disastrous for the destitute. Second-and third-generation welfare claimants are growing up without any connection to the world of work. For, just as governments were bad at building cars or installing telephones, just as they made a poor job of operating airlines or administering hospitals, so they have made a terrible mess of the relief of poverty.

In assuming monopolistic responsibility for social policy, European states have balefully redefined how their citizens relate to one another. It wasn’t so long ago that any adult, seeing a child out of school during term, would stop him and say, “Why aren’t you in class?” Now this is seen as the state’s duty. It wasn’t so long ago that we all kept an eye out for elderly neighbors, and looked to see that they were still collecting their milk bottles each morning. Now this, too, is seen as the government’s responsibility. When unusually heavy snow carpeted Europe at the end of 2009, people complained because the authorities were slow to clear their driveways and pavements. Their grandparents simply would have taken out their shovels.

The most damaging aspect of Euro-statism is neither its deleterious economic effects nor its inefficiency, but its impact on the private sphere. As the state has expanded, society has dwindled. Government officials—outreach workers, disability awareness counselors, diversity advisers, inspectors, regulators, licensors, clerks—have extended their jurisdiction.

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