The Socialist Welfare States That Bernie Sanders Loves are Funded by Fossil Fuel Production

From Somewhat Reasonable at the Heartland Institute:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has often talked about his desire for the United States to emulate the socialist welfare states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden by providing free college and health care and expanding Social Security. Sanders also wants to ban oil, natural gas, and coal production on lands owned by the federal government, and he has called for a ban on hydraulic fracturing, which has dramatically increased production of oil and natural gas in the United States.

Although many would-be Sanders voters may rejoice at all of these notions, someone really ought to inform the senator and his followers that the socialist spending sprees of Denmark and Norway are bankrolled by oil: Big Oil, to be specific.

The whole notion of the socialist welfare state is based on the notion that people can have lots of goodies, delivered by government, at somebody else’s expense.

Of course, eventually socialists run out of other people’s money. But they can keep the scam going for a while longer if they fully exploit fossil fuel production.

Read the whole thing.

The Fruits of European Socialism: Homelessness in France

From Reuters:

When the first of 16 families entered a vacant four-storey office block in Paris one night last December, they placed repeated food orders so the neighbors could see from the comings-and-goings of delivery men that the address was occupied. Under French law, witness accounts of residency make eviction harder.

But it was their next act that really had the building’s owner shaking his head in disbelief.

“What amazed me was when they invited in the housing minister a few days later,” said Spanish property developer Ignacio Lasa Georgas, who has temporarily lost control of his 7- million-euro ($9 million) office block between the Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est railway stations.

“And over she came to give them her support.”

The squat at Number 2 rue de Valenciennes is both a political battleground and a symbol of France’s dysfunctional housing market. Activists helped the families move in to draw attention to how Europe’s second biggest economy, which prides itself on its welfare system, is struggling to provide basic shelter for many of its 65 million citizens. The problem is not unique to France, but the reasons for it are both aggravated by, and feed into, the country’s wider economic woes.

The housing shortage is further fueled by long-standing policies to protect tenants that discourage many owners from putting properties up for rent. Housing experts say as many as 7 percent of all apartments in Paris are vacant.

Protecting people from the evil, rapacious landlords is a notion to warm the hearts of every leftist and socialist. But that has consequences.

The red tape that clogs up bids for planning permission, as well as a steadily growing list of regulations on everything from safety to parking spaces, has also discouraged new building. Strict rules on building figure prominently in the total 400,000 regulations in France’s law books. In Le Mans, a city famed for its motor races, plans for a new school have hit trouble because authorities are insisting it be earthquake-proofed — despite a government report stating there has never been any evidence of seismic activity in the region.

Again, the idea is to protect people. But politicians and bureaucrats can always find the need to “protect” people from dangers that aren’t significant, or if they are significant, the protection turns out to be vastly worse than the hazard.

The shortage is plain on the streets of the capital. An early morning walk reveals huddles of cardboard and blankets in doorways, the makeshift abodes of some of the 33,000 people estimated by housing charity Abbe Pierre Foundation to be living rough in France — a figure that rises to 274,000 including those in shelters, short-term bedsits and improvised homes on campsites or the like.

That is nearly half the 633,782 people officially recorded as homeless on a single night last year in the United States, a country whose population is almost five times that of France. Exact comparisons are difficult because the countries use different methods, but both measures include people who are living rough or in temporary shelters.

Add to the homeless those living in acute overcrowding or moving from sofa to sofa, and Abbe Pierre, the charity, estimates a total of 3.6 million people in the country lack decent housing. The group puts the shortfall of affordable housing at more than 800,000.

Doesn’t sound like the stereotype of European socialism found among liberal U.S. journalists, or leftist American professors.

Under French law, squatting is a civil offence and evictions not simple. In France, no one can be evicted in winter. Data on squatting is hard to find, but the latest estimates suggest it has risen sharply in Paris — helped by increasingly organized activists — to around 20,000 squatters from about 3,000 in 2002, said Hans Pruijt of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, who has studied the practice across Europe.

Lasa Georgas, owner of the rue de Valenciennes building, has launched legal action to regain control of his building. Its last tenant — jewellery shop “Histoire d’Or” — moved to a more upmarket site before its lease ran out in March 2012. Lasa Georgas says he had new takers lined up including a private college, and an investor who wanted to buy the building to convert into a hotel. They even made a formal offer, but both projects are now on ice while he sorts out the squatters. Given the local government has intervened to support the families, that may take some time.

Despite his legal claim, Lasa Georgas is unsure when he will have access to the place, if ever. Hollande’s Socialist allies at Paris City Hall announced in April they would make an offer on the building, with a view to buying it to convert into social housing.

In France, local authorities have a pre-emption right to bid for buildings for the wider public good. This does not mean they can force a sale, but it obliges owners to either enter negotiations or challenge them in court, which can take years.

Jean-Yves Mano, the Paris deputy mayor in charge of housing, said City Hall made a “symbolic” gesture to buy the building. He declined to say how much it had offered, but called the price a “significant mark-down” on the market value which a government agency had put at 7 million euros.

He says City Hall uses its pre-emption right on up to 30 buildings a year and has no qualms about bidding low. “After all, we are responsible for looking after the money of the people of Paris,” he told Reuters at his office.

Lasa Georgas said the city’s offer was 4.3 million euros, which he rejected. He is angry. “I invested in France back in 2005 because at that point Spanish property prices were already sky-high and I thought French law would give me protection. But the authorities seem to have a clear aim of taking away my building.” A hearing on the case in early May was postponed on procedural grounds.

So leftists in France (and even right-of-center governments have to make concessions to a socialist culture in Europe) fail to protect an owner’s property rights. They allow squatters to occupy his property, and then threaten to de facto confiscate it at far less than fair market value. Redress in the courts is questionable.

The consequence of these sort of policies is obvious: people don’t invest when their investments are not secure.

So France has a much larger per capita population of homeless people than the U.S.

A naïve view would say that this is idealism gone wrong. But socialism has never been based on idealism. It has been based on the selfishness and envy of the poor and working class people in Europe, and the lust for power of the leftist elites: the political activists, union officials, college professors, intellectuals, journalists and government bureaucrats.

And under Obama, the U.S. is moving in the same direction.

Economically Illiterate: Demanding a “Living Wage”

Don Walker of the Journal-Sentinel, who wrote an absurdly biased story about attempts in the state legislature to rein in some of the excesses of Milwaukee government, has followed it up with an equally biased story about a demonstration by local union activists demanding a “living wage” at local fast-food restaurants.

It’s basically a puff piece, quoting only activists and people sympathetic to the activists, and giving no indication that anybody but an evil greedy capitalist might oppose the notion.

But in fact, anybody who is serious about public policy will oppose the notion.

Typical of what liberals who know some economics think is this column by Christina Romer, who was chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Dealing with President Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9.00 per hour (far less radical than the $15 that the activists want), she goes through the evidence on various related issues. Being a liberal, she bends over backwards to find good in the policy, but still comes out against it.

. . . businesses pass along some of the cost of a higher minimum wage to consumers through higher prices. Often, the customers paying those prices — including some of the diners at McDonald’s and the shoppers at Walmart — have very low family incomes. Thus this price effect may harm the very people whom a minimum wage is supposed to help.

It’s precisely because the redistributive effects of a minimum wage are complicated that most economists prefer other ways to help low-income families. For example, the current tax system already subsidizes work by the poor via an earned-income tax credit. A low-income family with earned income gets a payment from the government that supplements its wages. This approach is very well targeted — the subsidy goes only to poor families — and could easily be made more generous.

Just how generous the welfare state is for low income workers in Wisconsin can be seen by going to the website access.wi.gov.

There, one can enter a hypothetical person or family, and see what sort of aid they would get if they worked for the current minimum wage.

Suppose, for example, we posit a family with a single mom and two children.  She is working 30 hours per week (it’s easier to get a part-time job than a full-time job) at the current Federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour).  Her children  are both school age (8 and 11).  She pays $500 a month for an apartment, and has to pay a heating bill.

What does she get, according to the official state website?

• Her earnings are $935 per month
• She can get a minimum of $430 a month in food stamps

This works out to $16,380 per year.  In addition she can get yearly:

• A minimum of $5,236 Federal Earned Income Tax Credit
• Wisconsin Earned Income Tax Credit of $575
• At heating benefit of at least $210
• A benefit toward her electric bill of at least $166

Thus her actual income (if you count food stamps as “good as cash”) is $22,567. (Given the complication of some of these programs, this is actually an approximation, but it’s most likely on the low side.)

In addition to these benefits, her family can get:

• BadgerCarePlus Standard plan
• Help paying for child care
• Free school lunches for the children
• Summer meals for the children

Note that her cash income ($22,567) is well above the $19,530 that is the Federal Poverty Level for Wisconsin for a family of three.

A Rational Welfare State

What we have here is a rational welfare state. It’s not perfect, and it’s probably a bit too generous, but what it does is help workers with little human capital (and thus little earning ability) without distorting labor markets.

Then why are the labor and left activists such yahoos about the issue?

They would not admit it (perhaps not even to themselves), but they want labor markets distorted. When a high minimum wage causes unemployment, that is an excuse for more stimulus spending. When income inequality increases because poor people are put out of jobs, that’s an excuse for more redistribution. When poor people have trouble affording food because prices have been driven up, that’s a reason to spend more on food stamps.

Of course, an extremely high minimum age reduces the incentive for employers to resist unionization. That goes to the fundamental agenda behind the whole “living wage” movement. It’s not really about low-wage workers at all. It’s about unionizing the workforce, since unions are the key organizational backbone behind the Democratic Party. This isn’t humanitarian politics at all. It’s about giving more power to leftist elites.

More on Disability: New Welfare or New Unemployment Insurance?

Some commenters have challenged our post on the increasing number of people on disability insurance, making the following claims:

1. The real cause of the increase in disability is a poor economy . . . and

2. That it’s substantially due to the declining health of the population, and particularly due to the fact that an aging population resulted in more Americans in the age range (50-64) where health problems are prevalent.

An authoritative discussion of the increasing disability rolls comes from MIT economist David H. Autor.

There is some validity to the claim that a poor economy leads to more people on disability. Quoting Autor:

The growth of the SSDI rolls is not solely due to changes in the program’s eligibility criteria, however. The labor market has played a key contributing role. Previous research has established that workers are most likely to apply for SSDI benefits following job loss, a fact underscored by the pronounced positive correlation between the national unemployment rate and the SSDI application rate. The secular decline in earnings and employment opportunities for U.S. workers with high school or lower education over the last three decades has also made SSDI an increasingly attractive option for job losers and long-term unemployed.

However, as with everything else associated with the welfare state, when you reward dependency, you will get more dependent people:

As highlighted by Autor and Duggan (2003), the effective replacement rate of labor earnings with SSDI benefits has also risen in recent decades due both to the rising value of in-kind Medicare benefits and to a subtle interaction between the SSDI benefits formula and rising income inequality in the U.S. This interaction causes SSDI’s effective generosity for low-wage workers to rise as wages in the lower deciles of the distribution fall relative to the mean. Hence, absent any changes in the SSDI program, it is a near certainty that the deteriorating U.S. labor market for less educated workers would have caused SSDI applications to rise in recent decades. The Congressional liberalizations of the program enacted in 1984, however, allowed this surge in demand for benefits to translate into a substantial growth in the SSDI rolls.

As for the argument that people are becoming less healthy, that seems to be without much merit:

2.2 The role of population health and aging

The expanding size and cost of the SSDI program would not be inherently problematic if this expansion reflected a rising rate of disability among working-age adults and, moreover, if the program’s mounting expenditures enabled these individuals to maintain employment and self-sufficiency. Neither appears to be the case. Figure 6 shows that the fraction of middle-age adults reporting a disability has been roughly stable over the last two decades, averaging approximately 10 percent among both men and women.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the underlying health of the working-age population in the U.S. is deteriorating. For example, one of the most common and rapidly expanding diagnoses for individuals receiving SSDI awards is mental illness, which comprised more than 20 percent of SSDI awards in over the past decade. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine (Kessler et al. 2005) reports that the prevalence of mental disorders in the U.S. population was unchanged between 1990 and 2003. In the same interval, the rate of treatment of mental illness substantially increased—which in turn should have contributed to improved work-readiness among individuals coping with mental illness.

Using self-reported health data from the National Health Interview Survey, Duggan and Imberman (2008) find a substantial improvement between 1984 and 2004 in the average health of U.S. adults between the ages of 50 and 64. This age group is especially relevant because it accounted for 62 percent of all SSDI recipients in 2004. Reinforcing these conclusions, demographers Kenneth Manton and XiLiang Gu of Duke University (2001) find that the share of the population ages 65 and older suffering from a chronic disability fell by one-third between 1982 and 1999 (from 26.2 to 19.7 percent), with the largest drop between 1994 and 1999. In net, there is little reason to believe that the work capacity of adults with disabilities has declined in recent decades.

Perhaps surprisingly, the aging of the U.S. population—in particular, the passing of the baby boom generation into middle age—has made only a modest contribution so far to the growth of Disability Insurance. Calculations from Duggan and Imberman (2008) reveal that, holding age- specific rates of receipt of disability benefits at their 1984 base, the aging of the population between 1984 and 2004 explains only 6 percent of the increase in the fraction of non-elderly adults receiving Disability Insurance through 2004. The contribution of aging to program growth is numerically overwhelmed by the growth of SSDI recipients within given age groups.

The bottom line here is not that having a social safety net is a bad idea. It’s that it’s a good idea with huge dangers attached. The welfare state tends to take on a momentum of its own, with ever increasing dependency. But simply having people dependent on government is not nearly so bad as an ethos of dependency, in which people come to think that, as a matter of right, they have a claim on a decent lifestyle, regardless of work or effort. Europe is far down that path, and we see the results.

We seem to be following, pushed along by elites who benefit from change.

The table below (from Autor) tells the story.

Disability: The New Welfare

From, of all places, National Public Radio, a most insightful piece on the explosion of disability in recent years.

They are not the first to notice this rapid rise, but they provide a lot of insight into how it has happened.

Essentially, it is too easy to get on disability, even on the basis of vague or ill-defined medical problems. When one looks at the vastly increased numbers in recent years, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that most of these people could work. But why do that, when you can draw a regular check?

In the 1990s, led by the state of Wisconsin, “welfare” (technically, AFDC) was reformed, and women on the program required to work. Welfare had long been stereotyped (with considerable justification) as a program that discouraged work and supported idleness. Thus highly effective work requirements were put into effect.

But while “welfare” had a bad reputation, few people had any desire to get tough on people who were “disabled.” It’s not your fault, after all, if you have a medical condition. Of course, there are medical conditions and there are “medical conditions.” There has been a marked shift over time in the composition of the “medical conditions” that allow people to be on disability. Conditions that can produce a hard diagnosis (heart disease, cancer, respiratory disease) have either remained constant or declined as a proportion of those on disability, while back pain and mental illness have radically increased. But the American people have not become less healthy over the past (say) 30 years.

Ironically, the growth of disability has vitiated another piece of Federal legislation: the Americans With Disabilities Act. That Act was based on the assumption that people with disabilities can work, especially if employers are required to make an “accommodation” for their disability. But the trend, unfortunately, has not been to get disabled people into the workforce, but to take them out of the workforce with government assistance.

This, like the growth of AFDC in the 60s, 70s and 80s, is another example of how good intentions can get out of hand and produce highly negative results. The graphs below tell the story.

Food Stamp Nation

From Zero Hedge, the fact that food stamp dependency has reached an all-time high. See the two charts below (click on the charts to see a larger image).

Of course, use of food stamps should increase in economic hard times. But the problem is that, while the number of jobs in the economy has rebounded a bit (and unemployment decreased a bit) food stamp dependency continues to increase.The NFP number below is “non-farm payroll” jobs.

So why has the number of people on food stamps increased when the need for food stamps decreased.

There are two possible answers, and we don’t know of data that would answer which is the most important. First, explicit government policies designed to enroll more people in government welfare programs may be having an effect.

Secondly, a culture of dependency, which clearly exists, may be becoming more and more prevalent, as an ethic of self-reliance continues to decay. As, in some sectors of society, dependency becomes more and more the norm, it becomes less and less stigmatized. Thus, dependency begets dependency, with culture as the mediating factor.

Greece, the Future of America?

From Front Page Magazine:

Heretofore, debt-defaulting Greece has operated on Raiders of the Lost Ark-logic: “You throw me the idol; I’ll throw you the whip.” Its European Union and International Monetary Fund sugar daddies have tired of sending cash without budget reforms in return. On Thursday, they rejected Greece’s newest amorphous pledge of budget cuts later for billions now. Burned before by big promises with no fulfillment, the Eurogroup sent a clear message to the Greeks through its chair Jean-Claude Juncker: “no disbursement before implementation.”

But with Greece already forcing creditors to take a haircut, and refusing to make good on its pledged reforms, why would European nations agree to throw more good money after bad?

A coalition of Greek political leaders came to an agreement on Thursday to narrow the chasm between revenues and receipts in hopes of paving the way for $172 billion in new loans from the European Union. But EU finance ministers balked at the proposal that contained very little in specified cuts for non-defense-related government expenditures. The European finance ministers demanded from the troubled nation $325 billion in new cuts and parliament’s preapproval of the plan before it will agree to a further bailout. Greece, which is already de facto in default since other nations are paying its creditors, stands to legally default on March 20 if it doesn’t receive a cash infusion.

The refusal to implement promised budgetary and economic structural reforms is a tacit admission that Greek politicians believe the debt crisis just isn’t their fault. This is a popular sentiment within Greece, muted only when going abroad with hat in hand. Foreign bankers, EU bureaucrats, and American capitalists are favorite scapegoats according to internal Greek rhetoric. If outsiders are to blame for the crisis, why should Greeks reform their economic system? It’s everyone else who has the problem, after all, not Greece.

This attitude manifests itself in periodic temper-tantrum street protests and strikes by state workers. Government officials behave similarly in refusing to cut state jobs and services lest they alienate voters and find themselves out of a job. The procrastination seems to be based on the hope that the EU will inflate the currency—as Greece so often did when it controlled its money in the past—and print away the nation’s debts. Given that one in ten Greeks, and one in four employed Greeks, calls government boss, the country’s political leaders have made it nearly impossible to institute meaningful reform. The politicians have bribed the populace into supporting big government, and the populace’s dependence on the behemoth state has made it politically suicidal for politicians to cut into it. Not doing what is personal political suicide is surely national political suicide.

“That’s enough, we can’t take it anymore,” chanted protesters in Athens on Tuesday. The mantra is that there is nothing left to cut. The media is only too willing to repeat it. The New York Times characterized the initial rejected agreement as “a package of harsh austerity measures,” while the UK’s Independent claimed that the “austerity drive has sent unemployment to a record high of 18.2 per cent and the country’s finances into a spiral of recession.”

But Europe’s finance ministers know something that journalists do not. There hasn’t been an austerity drive. Sacrifices have been demanded of taxpayers, such as a 217 percent rise in property taxes. And this deprivation has resulted in three years of negative growth—with a debt-to-GDP ratio set to approach 160 percent this year. But there has been no state austerity program. Greece’s government increased its spending by six percent last year. What is austere about that?

Is there nothing left to cut? Child care is free in Greece. So is university education. Private colleges, and home schooling, are forbidden. The dole is a constitutional right. So is health care, which is provided by the state. The government picks up the tab on trips to the dentist and eye doctor. The country’s 2010 budget identified 74 state-owned enterprises worth 44 billion euros. Workers retire at an average age of 53, with decades of pensions acting as a severe burden on taxpayers.

This attitude manifests itself in periodic temper-tantrum street protests and strikes by state workers. Government officials behave similarly in refusing to cut state jobs and services lest they alienate voters and find themselves out of a job. The procrastination seems to be based on the hope that the EU will inflate the currency—as Greece so often did when it controlled its money in the past—and print away the nation’s debts. Given that one in ten Greeks, and one in four employed Greeks, calls government boss, the country’s political leaders have made it nearly impossible to institute meaningful reform. The politicians have bribed the populace into supporting big government, and the populace’s dependence on the behemoth state has made it politically suicidal for politicians to cut into it. Not doing what is personal political suicide is surely national political suicide.

“That’s enough, we can’t take it anymore,” chanted protesters in Athens on Tuesday. The mantra is that there is nothing left to cut. The media is only too willing to repeat it. The New York Times characterized the initial rejected agreement as “a package of harsh austerity measures,” while the UK’s Independent claimed that the “austerity drive has sent unemployment to a record high of 18.2 per cent and the country’s finances into a spiral of recession.”

But Europe’s finance ministers know something that journalists do not. There hasn’t been an austerity drive. Sacrifices have been demanded of taxpayers, such as a 217 percent rise in property taxes. And this deprivation has resulted in three years of negative growth—with a debt-to-GDP ratio set to approach 160 percent this year. But there has been no state austerity program. Greece’s government increased its spending by six percent last year. What is austere about that?

Is there nothing left to cut? Child care is free in Greece. So is university education. Private colleges, and home schooling, are forbidden. The dole is a constitutional right. So is health care, which is provided by the state. The government picks up the tab on trips to the dentist and eye doctor. The country’s 2010 budget identified 74 state-owned enterprises worth 44 billion euros. Workers retire at an average age of 53, with decades of pensions acting as a severe burden on taxpayers.

“Nothing left to cut” is the rhetoric. Reality is closer to “Nothing has been cut.”

So much of it sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

A bloated public sector, and riots (or near riots) when an effort is made to cut back (read: Madison).

Promises to implement austerity and get things under control that are cavalierly broken (read: Obama budget).

Attempts to find scapegoats to avoid facing reality (read: the one percent).

Attempts to fix the problem with increased taxes (read: Illinois).

Government control of industry (read: General Motors).

Even the outlawing of home schooling, when hasn’t come to American yet, is clearly a battle that will have to be fought, given the fact that liberals view public schools as a means to indoctrinate children into their orthodoxies about homosexuality, global warming, and such.

If the liberals win, nobody can say we didn’t see what the consequences would be.

Mean Spirited Christmas Greeting from the Marquette Center for Peacemaking

While some of their activities are bland enough, a Christmas e-mail from the Center for Peacemaking reminds us that, at root, they are mean-spirited leftists. Here is part of the text:

After four weeks of Advent awaiting the coming of the Savior, December 25th can leave us a bit puzzled, if not disappointed.

Because we need a savior. Doesn’t take much in the way of spirituality to figure that out. We just need to look at the “signs of the times.” With a government pledged to “perpetual war,” and more and more wealth (as the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations constantly remind us) taken from the needs of the many to benefit the very few (and yes, those two facts are related), with ongoing environmental degradation, and with over 17 million US households listed as “food insecure,” our world, our country needs some serious saving.

But what do we get on Christmas day? Not a team of expert economists, not a super committee of legislators, not a war council or a national security organization, but a baby – an infant (root meaning: “can’t talk”), someone insecure, vulnerable and needing assistance, not offering it. What was God THINKING?

So there is no “peace on earth, good will toward men.” Rather, there is class warfare and hatred of the military.

If the people associated with the Center for Peacemaking were morally serious, they might actually know that government in the U.S. spends over two trillion dollars per year to pay social welfare benefits.

If they were morally serious they would actually question why “over 17 million US households listed as ‘food insecure’” notwithstanding the fact that government spends 54 billion dollars per year on the food stamp program.

Morally serious people actually care about the details of public policy. Those who prance and preen and tout their concern for the poor in blissful ignorance of how public policy works are not morally serious. They are simply engaged in a kind of moral masturbation.

Support for ObamaCare At New Low

This based on a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation:

Support for ObamaCare can be measured in two ways. First, we can ask whether Americans

Do you think you and your family will be better off or worse off under the new health reform law, or don’t you think it will make much difference?

The number of people saying “worse off” is close to the all time high, and is currently at 31%.

The number of people saying “better off” is at an all time low, at 25%.

The chart is below (you can click on the image to see it full size).


Public disapproval of an extension of the welfare state is rare. Usually, the public just sees they are getting goodies, and isn’t inclined to ask questions about who pays, and when the bill comes due.

But now it’s different. The public is aware that there is a lot they may lose.

The Perverted Culture of the European Welfare State

From the Associated Press:

MARSEILLE, France (AP) — Battling for benefits is a tradition in the Gilly family, passed from generation to generation — as it is for families across the country. And that goes some way toward explaining why the protests against plans to raise France’s retirement age have shown such determination and ferocity.

For Gilly and many other Frenchmen and women, social benefits such as long vacations, state-subsidized health care and early retirement are more than just luxuries: They’re seen as a birthright — an essential part of the identity of today’s France.

The protest against a government plan to raise the retirement age to 62 has special meaning for five members of the Eric Gilly clan who are demonstrating in the streets of Marseille.

“We want to stop working at 60 because it’s something our parents, our grandparents and even our great-grandparents fought for,” says Gilly, 50, a union representative at Saint-Pierre Cemetery, the largest in this bustling Mediterranean port city.

“And over the years ... you can see that we’re losing everything they fought for. And that’s unacceptable.”

In Marseille, strikes to protest President Nicolas Sarkozy’s planned retirement reform have shut down docks, left tons of garbage putrefying on sidewalks and drawn tens of thousands into the streets for each of six protest marches since early September.

Gilly, with huge drums strapped over his shoulders, led the parade for the Workers’ Force union Monday. His sister, two daughters and a nephew weren’t far behind.

“Unionism, it’s in the skin,” Gilly said in an interview with Associated Press Television News. “It’s more than a passion. When something is wrong or things aren’t right, they have to be changed.”

Retirement benefits are coveted, by some, perhaps even more than a higher salary, making the issue particularly sensitive. Sarkozy’s plan to raise the retirement age hits a nerve deep in the French psyche.

Just savor, for a minute, how absurd this is. The French are proud of not working.

They demand more and more benefits. But of course, they have to pay for those benefits.

The origin of the European welfare state was socialist politicians appealing to the working class, telling them (in effect) “vote us into power, and we will take money from the rich and give it to you.” The whole edifice, in other words, was built on the selfishness of socialist politicians and low income workers.

But of course, soon enough the bill has to be paid by ordinary workers. But the old notion that you can just make demands on government and get goodies for free persists.

The fundamental problem is that the culture of Europe is not rooted in capitalism, but in feudalism — as political scientist Louis Hartz famously insisted.

For peasants, bettering yourself by working harder just wasn’t possible. You only became better off by being given something — by the Lord of the Manor, or by the King, or by the parliament. It’s a culture of dependency, not of work, responsibility and achievement. It’s a backward culture, and part of the greatness of America is that we have resisted it.

The Death Spiral of the Secular Culture

It may be that demography is destiny, but it often seems like a boring subject. But it shouldn’t be, since vastly important things turn on demography. And especially on fertility.

The following are from a long article in the Washington Post.

For the first time in 35 years, the U.S. fertility rate has climbed high enough to sustain a stable population, solidifying the nation’s unique status among industrialized countries.

The overall fertility rate increased 2 percent between 2005 and 2006, nudging the average number of babies being born to each woman to 2.1, according to the latest federal statistics. That marks the first time since 1971 that the rate has reached a crucial benchmark of population growth: the ability of each generation to replace itself.

“It’s been quite a long time since we’ve had a rate this high,” said Stephanie J. Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics. “It’s a milestone.”

While the rising fertility rate was unwelcome news to some environmentalists, the “replacement rate” is generally considered desirable by demographers and sociologists because it means a country is producing enough young people to replace and support aging workers without population growth being so high it taxes national resources.

“This is a noteworthy event,” said John Bongaarts of the Population Council, a New York-based think tank. “This is a sign of demographic health. Many countries would like to be at this level.”

Europe, Japan and other industrialized countries have long had fertility rates far below the replacement level, creating the prospect of labor shortages and loss of cultural identity as the proportion of native-born residents shrinks in relation to immigrant populations.

The reasons for the unusual U.S. fertility rate are the focus of intense interest. Experts can only speculate, but they cite a complex mix of factors, including lower levels of birth control use than in other developed countries, widely held religious values that encourage childbearing, social conditions that make it easier for women to work and have families, and a growing Hispanic population.

“It’s not clear which of these factors is most important,” Bongaarts said.

While being a mother who works outside the home is far from easy for many American women, many experts said the United States is in many ways more amenable to the practice than many other developed countries. The high-octane consumer economy, for example, helps women run households more efficiently in a number of ways, including making prepared foods more widely available, and weekend and late-night shopping possible. American men are also helping more with their children than in the past, experts say.

“We also have a relatively high percentage of part-time jobs available,” said Ronald Rindfuss, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina.

These, of course, are jobs that don’t offer the benefits that full-time jobs do. These are the jobs that are claimed to be exploitative by people who love the rigid social democratic union-dominated model of Europe. But in this, as in a lot of other things, the flexible free market economy of the U.S. serves us well.

“There’s also more shift work outside the normal nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday schedule that enables parents to share child care.”

The nation’s religiosity also contributes to the higher fertility rate, which varies geographically, experts said. Red states tend to have both more religious people and higher fertility rates.

“Americans are much more religious than Europeans: They believe in God more. They go to church more,” said Charles Westoff, a Princeton University demographer. “That sort of religious attitude or set of values is strongly correlated with fertility.”

There is, in fact, a huge irony here.

The secular folks in Europe and in blue-state America are the ones who sneer at Intelligent Design and view Darwin as making belief in God unnecessary -- or even dangerous.

(We have no beef with Darwinism as a scientific theory. But when people try to make it the entire explanation for why we are here in this world, we smell dogmatism.)

The culture of the secular people fails the most basic Darwinian test: survival.

The culture with superior Darwinian “fitness” is the culture of religious people.

Without an infusion of religious immigrants, secular societies wither away.

And they are particularly likely to get into fiscal trouble because of another project of the secular leftist elites: the overly-extensive welfare state. Those societies that have made the most extensive promises of government benefits are the ones lacking the demography to deliver on the promises.

Heaven knows Americans are too secular, and our welfare state has promised too much. But we can look to Europe to see how bad things can really get.