At 21:49 25/09/2011, Mike Gurstein wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/world/europe/as-welfare-state-collapses-greeks-suffer-and-fear-future.html
Not very long, to answer the question in the Subject line.
As well the Greeks might be fearing already. As well we might, too.
In England we have an incredibly inefficient and wasteful welfare
state and major reforms have been planned for years. But now our
Treasury officials (the real power-holders in any and every
nation-state) have just told our Chancellor that we can't even afford
the cost of reforms! Headlines in today's Daily Telegraph are:
"Osborne is warned of welfare reform disaster"
No advanced nation-state can afford an "adequate" welfare state for
much longer because it was devised (unknowingly) as a Ponzi scheme.
Unlike a private pension scheme in which money is saved and invested
in a fund which then pays profits as dividends, nation-state welfare
schemes depend on current worker contributions. In the state system,
as the burden of the old, the ill, the delinquent and the unemployed
grows, then taxation from workers is supposed to grow even faster to
pay for it.
The originators of the modern welfare state (Count von Bismark in
19th century Germany and Lord Beveridge in 20th century England)
shouldn't really be blamed. In the heyday of economic growth they
both thought that there would always be plenty of current workers
available to pay for it. They were also unable to foresee just how
long people would live these days or how small families would become.
Those who ought to be blamed, however, are the civil servants (and
their politician puppets) of the last few decades in the advanced
countries who've been in denial and have made no effort to reform it
so far. They must have been aware of the problem because they've been
surreptitiously encouraging mass immigration by poor people from the
Third World who can live (to them, in relative luxury) off welfare
state handouts while they look for work*. The free movement of labour
according to skills is one thing but this devious practice for
political power purposes has been quite another.
*And have competed for jobs more successfully against the dregs of
our own secondary school system -- another product of the advanced
nation-state. In England, among 14 year-old boys, approaching half
are now completely alienated from education and would like to leave
school if they were allowed to. I dare say it's not a lot different
in Western Europe and America.
We'll always have welfare (if we remain remotely human) but it won't
be of the sort that presently operates. Besides the collapse of state
welfare systems we'll likely have the collapse of most large private
pension schemes. Most of them had black holes even before the 2008/9
collapse. Many of them are already adjusting their pensions
downwards. If (or, rather, when) the Eurozone economy collapses to a
new lower level, likely taking America and China with it, then state
welfare will likely regress to something like a benefit-queue system
with basic hand-outs irrespective of real need or former expectations.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/
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