May 16, 2003
BELGIUM, MEET ARGENTINA
Belgium Will Pay For This Election (Johan Van Overtveldt, Wall Street Journal Europe, 5/16/2003)If it is true that a country's citizens get the politicians they deserve, then Belgians, and especially the Flemings, have a major problem on their hands. Opinion polls in the run-up to this Sunday's federal elections consistently show Steve Stevaert of the Flemish Socialist Party to be by far the most popular politician in Flanders....
Mr. Stevaert, you see, owes his popularity to the fact that, in government, he developed himself into "Mister For-Free."
In his hometown of Hasselt he made public transportation free for large parts of the population, a trick he has since repeated throughout Flanders, the northern and more economically significant, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. He also coerced private electricity producers into giving a limited amount of electricity for free to Belgian families.
Once democratic voters lose their sense that they are in a cooperative venture with their fellow citizens, and feel rather that they are in a competitive fight and must exploit their fellow citizens before they themselves are exploited, then society goes to hell. The state becomes a kleptocracy, an instrument in the hands of the politically powerful to steal from the politically weak. And the more theft occurs, the more is the sense that citizens are fundamentally at war with one another exacerbated. Therefore the combat tends to escalate, ending in destruction of the economy and, usually, the rise of dictators. This is the path that Argentina followed under the Peronists.
We increasingly see such combative attitudes here in the U.S. from Democrats. They see politics as governed by the law of the jungle -- it is "dog eat dog" -- and view Republicans as enemies, not partners. They look for opportunities to take from Republican taxpayers and give to themselves. With their trial lawyer allies, they've turned our courts into instruments of theft, as damage awards increasingly bear no relation to the pre-existing agreements and expectations of the contending parties. They promote the idea that corporations or the wealthy are enemies to Democratic voters. They promote among blacks the idea that white conservatives are enemies, as in the James Byrd advertisements during the 2000 campaign.
These attitudes are greatly promoted by the atomization of society that is created by big government. When people work together with others in cooperative ventures, they tend to bring a cooperative view to politics. When people spend their whole life in dependence upon the state, whether in welfare dependency or academic-university dependency or government-job dependency or affirmative-action-privilege dependency, they tend to see their fellow citizens as competitors for political spoils. It is no coincidence that Republicans are the more cooperative party, Democrats the more partisan one; that Republicans more often forgive offenses and give ground to obtain compromises, much to the chagrin of the VRWC.
I am only a distant observer of Europe, but I imagine these problems are present there as well, and probably much more advanced. The popularity of a politician who offers the lure of stealing from one's fellow citizens is a bad sign for Belgium. I wonder if their economic collapse will await their demographic collapse circa 2050, or come much sooner, as the kleptocratic hyenas nip and tear at the flanks of the productive. For who, in Old Europe, is stepping forward to stop the bleeding?