Hej Då Sweden

I have always had a soft spot for the country of Sweden.  The city of Umea was (perhaps still is) the sister city of Saskatoon, the city where I was born and went to college.  One of my best friends in college grew up in a home where they spoke Swedish pretty much exclusively, and I remember listening to their lilting conversations and wishing I could take part more fully.  During my first year playing for the University of Saskatchewan soccer team our modest fortunes depended largely on the skills of a foreign student, Stig, who had come over from Sweden for a year of study.  And though I no longer have any admiration for the regulatory heavy-handedness which decrees that companies must provide lengthy parental leave for new parents (480 days in Sweden, shared between the mother and the father, with 60 days reserved for each), one can at least surmise and admire the notion that the Swedish government believes that lasting parental involvement is the most important factor in the development of successful and happy children.  Well, up to a point.

Once a child is a year old or so, the Swedish government is no longer so concerned about lasting parental involvement.  At that point, other priorities take over, and parents who do not surrender their children to daycare and then the school system are now harassed and fined.  Until 2010, it was possible to home school in Sweden.  New laws prevent the practice in almost all cases, and private schools have to teach the state curriculum.  Parents who wish to home school are actually fleeing the country--many are going across the Baltic sea to the Aland Islands, a part of Finland where the locals speak Swedish and parents can home school in peace.  One has to wonder, why the heavy hand? Why the disconnect between the official philosophy of the first 16 months and the next 16 years?

I suspect I know the reason.  Gender equality is a huge issue in Sweden, and the implementation of policy designed to achieve it is backed by the full force of the government.  The website Sweden.Se says this:

"Sweden has one of the highest levels of gender equality in the world.  This is based on the belief that when women and men share power and influence equally it leads to a more just and democratic society.  A well-developed welfare system makes it easier for both sexes to balance their work and family life."

What this means, without saying it explicitly, is that the traditional division of labor between husband and wife is not really an acceptable arrangement any more, because men and women are not sharing power and influence equally.  In this way of thinking, the sharing of power and influence only occurs when men and women are out in the workforce together, doing the same jobs, and having the same dreams and ambitions.  To further that, manufactured rights (all children have a "right" to daycare), and punishment (in the form of fines and harassment should a family choose to buck the system and home school their children) are all designed to promote the idea that a woman's place is decidedly not in the home.  To show just how serious (and creepy) the Swedes are about their genderless society, there is a  preschool in Stockholm called "Egalia" (makes me gag) where the children are not boys or girls, only genderless "friends".  Pronouns such as "he" and "she" are not used at the school and have been replaced by new words that do not appear in any dictionary.

I have written in earlier essays that once you move beyond the functions of government that are broadly accepted by everyone -- infrastructure, national defense, the police, objective application of the rule of law -- it is very difficult to reach any sort of broad consensus on how the limited tax dollars of a country should be spent.  Inevitably, though there may be some significant number of citizens who feel that every child should attend a federally funded public school, and are willing to contribute their tax dollars toward this effort, there will be other citizens who prefer a different option.  Though I have no problem with a government sketching broad outlines designed to ensure that all children are indeed being educated, why should it matter how it happens?  What if you are a Swedish woman (or man) who is every bit the intellectual, accomplished, and ambitious equal of your spouse and you want to devote your waking hours not to the functioning of a retail store or a hospital, but to the education of your children?

Sorry, but you can't, and the reason you can't is that a small group of influential people have projected their vision of the correct way to live upon the Swedish population at large.  Tyranny results.  It's a soft tyranny at first; you only notice it if you pay attention.  This is the time when the utopian dreamers (all of this is for a better world) are satisfied to try and cajole and educate.  They print pamphlets, make television commercials, lecture at universities, attract disciples, and lobby politicians for expanded mandates and additional funding.  But there are always holdouts who are not enlightened enough to see the beauty of the new way of living, and this is when the totalitarian tendency always appears.  Friedrich Hayek put it this way in his landmark book, "The Road To Serfdom":

"... planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible."

In other words, the planners, the dreamers, the visionaries who only want to secure a better way of life for everyone say, "you know, if we're really going to get this thing done, we're just going to have to get rough with those who refuse to go willingly."  Which is why on one day in Sweden you are able to homeschool your children (though you must do it in the face of official discouragement), and the next day you cannot, unless you want to be fined and harassed.  Don't complain, it's for your own good.

I will always think fondly of my college friend, and the game-saving skills of Stig, but I am losing my interest in Sweden, the country.  I would hate to live under that sort of nanny-statism.  The Swedish people are not free, and I suspect that as time passes a very many of them will come to realize they have lost something very precious indeed.

Thinly Veiled Slander

In recent weeks, when discussing the budget framework proposed by Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the President referred to it as "thinly veiled Social Darwinism".  The statement was pejorative, of course, meant to convey the idea that Republicans would prefer that we all live in a sort of Hunger Games world where every man is pitted against every other man, tooth and claw, to secure the means of survival.  With that formulation, one can see how little President Obama thinks of the American people, how little he trusts us.  For it is only for the last 50 years that the United States has lived with an expansive social safety net.  Before the 1960's, which is when the intellectual class suddenly discovered that the cause of poverty was structural, not personal, the consensus among social scientists and the public at large was that poor people were no different than the rest of society in that there existed among them the full spectrum of moral capacity--some were good and some were bad.  Thus, the indiscriminate provision of aid to those who were wanting contained a substantial moral hazard, namely that the aid itself would reduce much of the incentive required to push people to work hard enough to take care of themselves, certainly among those who were less concerned about trying their best, and even among those who did care.  So for virtually all of American history, there existed no such thing as a lavish social safety net, and what did exist was hedged with qualifications to guard against the encouragement of vice.

And what happened during those dark days?  Families looked after each other.  Pioneers raised barns together.  Wealthy women in the large cities organized charity organizations to look after the deserving poor and to offer them spiritual guidance, encouragement, training, and jobs so they could begin to look after themselves.  Does the President think we are so different today?  Have we become, in the last 50 years, so uncaring, so greedy, so completely focused on ourselves that we care not a whit for our friends, family, and neighbors?  No, we haven't.  But if you follow the implications of the President's words through to their logical conclusion, that is where you end up.  It is a shame that this slander goes unchallenged.

And it's not as if the Ryan budget is proposing to take us back to the level of services that were offered a century ago.  Rather, it only proposes that we, in time, spend only as much as we make, rather than living beyond our means to the tune of 1 or 2 trillion a year.  According to the President, such economizing as is practiced daily by millions of families and businesses, and which must be done if we are not to end up as Greece writ gargantuan, is somehow cruel and unusual punishment.

Early in the morning on February 17th, 2012

Contrast the words below, from President Reagan's first inaugural address, with the paragraphs I quoted in my previous post about President Obama's State of the Union speech.

"From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

We hear much of special interest groups. Our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and our factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we are sick—professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truckdrivers. They are, in short, "We the people," this breed called Americans."

Whereas President Obama sees the government as the agent that defends the citizens against any and all injustices, President Reagan recognizes that it can also be the oppressor, and that this tendency must be constantly monitored and defended against.  The idea that governance could be better and more fairly conducted by "experts" is the basis for the progressive/liberal movement, but in the Obama administration there has been less emphasis on experts running the government "better", and more on experts running the government "meaner".  Meaning that the modern progressive sees the system as rigged against the ordinary citizen--rigged by special interest groups, rigged by rich people, rigged by corporations (owned by rich people), and rigged even by the environment itself (which they say is changing in ways that will be detrimental, even devastating to the average person, caused of course by corporations owned by rich people).  The response of the Obama administration to this malevolent universe is to punish those responsible by making them "pay their fair share".  And honestly, there are many ordinary citizens who have no interest in liberal/progressive ideology who see the system as rigged against them also, and they would be right.  The system is rife with carve-outs, loopholes, special deals, special rules, accommodations, and dispensations.  But here is the paradox.

President Obama's proposals to add more of the same, to add regulation and penalty that will tip the scales in favor of the little guy, only guarantee the perpetuation of the special interest politics that are a plague on us all.  Big government begets special interest politics.  Why?  Because if the government is in your business, then it is in your interest to lobby and twist the proposed rules to your advantage.  If the government leaves you alone, the reasons to lobby for advantage are diminished and your success depends to a greater degree on your own energy, creativity and intelligence.  Smaller government leaves us closer to the meritocracy we are supposed to be.

In the long term, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can only be secured through President Reagan's trust in everyday Americans, and it can only be lost through President Obama's trust in his experts.

Oh Captain My Captain

I watched about 60 or 70 percent of the State of the Union address last week.  The President definitely gave it the old college try, punctuating many of his statements with a throaty urgency that was calculated, I'm sure, to express just how much he cares about us and the country.  Listen to me people, can't you tell how hard I'm trying to do the right thing!

At the end of the speech I played an interesting game with myself.  Here is the text of the last paragraph:

"So it is with America. Each time I look at that flag, I'm reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those 50 stars and those 13 stripes. No one built this country on their own. This nation is great because we built it together. This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other's backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we are joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, and our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong."

I was reading the text of the speech as he delivered it, and as he read the sentences above, I added one word, several times.

So it is with America. Each time I look at that flag, I'm reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those 50 stars and those 13 stripes. No one built this country on their own. This nation is great because we built it together, voluntarily. This nation is great because we worked as a team, voluntarily. This nation is great because we get each other's backs, voluntarily. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we are joined in common purpose, voluntarily, as long as we maintain our common resolve, voluntarily, our journey moves forward, and our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

Right there, one sees the prism through which the President views the world.  He is correct when he says that no one built this country on their own, but the education, friendships, partnerships, negotiations, and collaborations it took to build this great nation were not all planned and facilitated by the federal government. He fails to understand that there is no Union unless the Union is voluntary.  Johah Goldberg stated it clearly in this recent article in National Review Online.  In reference to that same final paragraph he wrote:

This nation isn’t great because we work as a team with the president as our captain. America is great because America is free. It is great not because we put our self-interest aside, but because we have the right to pursue happiness.

Those of the liberal/progressive bent do not trust us to work together voluntarily, and they certainly don't want us pursuing too much happiness (they like to refer to it as greed), so they have undertaken to teach us all the error of our ways through the patient establishment of education and journalism professions that are largely sympathetic to their cause.  But they will never convince everyone, and recent trends in talk radio, television news, and alternatives to traditional public schools have made their job more difficult.  So the President's utopian vision will come about only if resort is made to those techniques that have worked before (and are the only ones that will ever work), totalitarianism and terror.

There was a moment in the speech when he used this quote from Abraham Lincoln:

"That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more."

Would that it were so!  This President plans on doing everything for us, or at the very least, telling us how to do everything.  Does he ever see a situation and think, you know, this'd probably turn out better if I just left things alone.

And this one's a howler.  When he was talking about energy, and the vast quantities of natural gas and oil that companies have recently figured out how to liberate from shales and other "tight" rocks, he said this:

"And by the way, it was public research dollars, over the course of 30 years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock - reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground."

Now I'm sure that there have been some professors and graduate students around the country who have done some publicly funded research projects that have contributed to the discovery of methods and technologies that allow hydrocarbons to be produced from rock formations that were previously ignored.  But to imply that they were a critical element is ridiculous.  Smart men and women, working on their own or for companies like Chesapeake, EOG, EnCana, and Devon, driven by profit potential and the excitement of discovery, are the reason that the United States is now known to be the host of vast reserves of natural gas and oil that were virtually unknown less than a decade ago.  To suggest otherwise is an insult.  The President wants us to do big things, like Hoover dams, and Golden Gate bridges, and interstate highways.  Finding enough natural gas to last the country for 100 years isn't big enough for you?

I'll leave you with this thought, formed freely and without coercion in my own mind.  Commerce, conducted freely, among all activities conducted by men, is perhaps the greatest agent of tolerance and cooperation of them all.  Given the propensity of this President to interfere, at every level, with the free conduct of commerce, is it any wonder that he is the most polarizing President I have known in my lifetime?

The Missing Link

Several months ago, I started reading what has turned out to be one of the most intellectually demanding books I have ever opened.  The book is a classic, "The Theory of Money and Credit", written by Ludwig von Mises in 1912, and first translated into English in the early 1930s by a British economist, Lionel Robbins, who learned Mises' business cycle theory from Mises' famous follower, Friedrich von Hayek.  Much of the book is very technical and demanding on the intellect of a non-economist such as myself--so demanding that I often had to accept the fact that I was not going to sort out the meaning of certain sections and passages, and plunge ahead regardless.  Part four of the book, entitled "Monetary Reconstruction" is the easiest to read, and the most related to all the previous writing I have done on this blog.  It addresses the political importance of sound money and the gold standard.  It is that which I plan to discuss.

Professor von Mises begins section four of his book by stressing the importance of a market economy and private property rights to the development of a prosperous and happy society.

The liberal doctrine sees in the market economy the best, even the only possible, system of economic organization of society.  Private ownership of the means of production tends to shift control of production to the hands of those best fitted for this job and thus to secure for all members of society the fullest possible satisfaction of their needs.

It makes nations and their citizens free and provides ample sustenance for a steadily-increasing population.

He then acknowledges that in order to protect the contracts and the property of those citizens who are going about, participating in the market economy, from criminals within and enemies without, governments must be formed.  In order to be able to enforce the laws which protect citizens, governments must be able to use force to punish aggression and deter attacks.  But then there is a danger.  How to keep those who are entrusted with the functions of government from turning their weapons, their instruments of compulsion and deterrence, against their own citizens.  That, says Ludwig von Mises, is the essential theme of Western civilization.

Defence of the individual's liberty against the encroachments of tyrannical governments is the essential theme of the history of Western civilization.  The characteristic feature of the Occident is its peoples' pursuit of liberty...  All the marvellous achievements of Western civilization are fruits grown on the tree of liberty.

Economic organization based on private property and a free market may indeed "secure for all members of society the fullest possible satisfaction of their needs", but it will not provide everyone with everything.  Every person, to varying degrees according to their wealth, must still make choices about which needs they choose to fulfill.  This is the very nature of the science of economics, which the aforementioned Lionel Robbins defined this way:  Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses.  The reality of life is that there has never been enough to satisfy everyone completely.  The place where every person is completely satisfied is not the Earth that we know, it is the Garden of Eden, where bad stuff went down despite the heavenly abundance.  It is this essential aspect of life that governments, through their monetary policies, have attempted to suspend, at first, I will be charitable, out of concern for their fellow human beings, but lately out of concern only for the perpetuation and growth of their power over others.  This is what Professor von Mises warned about.  How does this relate to the gold standard?  von Mises puts it this way:

It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments.  Ideologically it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights.

The excellence of the gold standard is to be seen in the fact that it renders the determination of the monetary unit's purchasing power independent of the policies of governments and political parties.  Furthermore, it prevents rulers from eluding the financial and budgetary prerogatives of the representative assemblies.  Parliamentary control of finances works only if the government is not in a position to provide for unauthorized expenditures by increasing the circulating amount of fiat money  Viewed in this light, the gold standard appears as an indispensable implement of the body of constitutional guarantees that make the system of representative government function.

I would say it this way.  The efforts and programs advanced by the progressive movement to improve society (so they say) and ameliorate suffering (so they say) have grown steadily since their first stirrings in the mid-1800s.  Eventually they grew so large and costly that the financial restrictions imposed by the gold standard could no longer be tolerated, and so the gold standard was abandoned in order to pave the way for the inflation, credit expansion, and fiat money that would be used to pay for the programs that would not be supported by the citizens if they knew about, and were forced to pay their full cost.  In the words of Professor von Mises:

It is not just an accident that in our age inflation has become the accepted method of monetary management.  Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government.  It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead towards totalitarianism.

I'll go further.  Over and over again we are bludgeoned with the message that greed and unfettered consumerism are the logical result of a capitalist system that rewards individual effort and self-interest.  Greed and consumerism are not the fault of capitalism.  Rather, it is the largely successful efforts of the progressive movement, funded by inflation and credit expansion, to prevent the citizens, rich, middle-class, and poor alike, from ever having to engage in that most necessary, most natural, most real of all human activities--making a choice.  It is the suspension of hard choices--a big house or a small house, a big car or a small car, an iPhone or a flip phone, to earn food or go hungry--that has led to the greed and consumerism we are saddled with.  The progressives have largely succeeded in their quest; they have borrowed and printed enough money to suspend want; they have given us our Garden of Eden.  But just like the biblical version, this garden has its serpents, and so we must either leave of our own accord, or, like the citizens of bankrupt Greece, be cast out by forces beyond our control.

No Soup For You, eh

When it comes to the list of what government should do on behalf of citizens, the Liberal/Progressive list is long—a single payer health care system, financial security for the elderly, early childhood education, school lunches, and on and on. Progressives have argued that governments should provide these services because there is a need--elderly people would suffer without Social Security, people will die prematurely without the security of  health care paid for by the government, children will go hungry without a school lunch program.  While it is certainly true that there have always been, and always will be people who have difficulty meeting the demands of life, I have long believed that many government services and programs also provide an incentive that creates the need they are designed to fulfill. So if the programs themselves are at least partially responsible for the needs that they fulfill, it is fair to ask whether we would miss them, whether we would actually suffer if they were gone. The topic of school lunches might be instructive in this regard. And thankfully, the North American continent provides us with a laboratory in which to conduct an experiment. Or rather, in which an experiment has been continuously conducted since 1946, which is when President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act, and when Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King did nothing of the sort. The United States has a school lunch program. Canada, the control group, does not.
 
I doubt that comparison of official government estimates of the number of children who are "food insecure" in Canada versus the U.S., or of other official statistics would provide much in terms of definitive conclusions as to the results of this 65 year experiment.  I trust that my personal experience, having lived the first 27 years of my life in Canada, and the last 19 in the United States, will be more instructive.

It is rare that people in America look to Canada for an example of a federal government that does less, but an article on the website www.parentcentral.ca states that “Canada is the only westernized nation without a national, federally funded school food program.” I grew up in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s, mainly in a small town in northern Saskatchewan, and I can confirm that my middle/high school contained no cafeteria of the sort that serves both breakfast and lunch to elementary and middle school children at the two Louisiana public schools that my offspring attend. Our school had a small kitchen with a lunch counter where classrooms and clubs could prepare lunches and sell them to students in order to raise funds for special projects or class trips, but that was small, local potatoes in comparison to the industry scale operation that is school lunch in the United States. Many of my friends carried their lunch to school in brown bags or lunch boxes, and since my family lived about a third of a mile from the school, my brother, sister and I would simply troop home for lunch where our English teacher mom and High School Principal dad would make chicken noodle soup and roast beef sandwiches for the five of us.

Our family, with its two steady incomes, was solidly middle class--as well off, perhaps even better off than most. We were never hungry. Given that, a critic might say that my experience does not negate the fact that there are people who are less well off who need government funded programs like school lunch. Not so fast. The town I grew up in had, and still has, a large First Nations population, approaching 50% of the residents. Some 2000 of those First Nations residents lived on reserves which border the town, and the problems which plague First Nations people everywhere were certainly present--alcohol and drug abuse, and poverty.  And certainly those problems also existed among the general population.  Daily, I shared my classrooms with children who undoubtedly came from households that had far less than we did. It may be that some of those students were hungry on occasion, but if they were, I don't remember it. Some of my school-age friends were not able to rise above the challenges of their surroundings and fell into depressing lives of drugs and crime. Others are healthy university graduates with spouses and children and promising, meaningful careers. I doubt that the absence of a school lunch program provided much impact either way.

Spending a few days in my old home town this past summer served to confirm my remembrances. The First Nations reserves do not look any more prosperous than they did 30 years ago, and there are still a few sad souls asking for money outside the liquor store, but chronic hunger does not look like a problem serious or pervasive enough to warrant the typical Fed response--"WE ARE HERE TODAY TO ANNOUNCE A WAR ON HUNGER!" In other words, the vast majority of Canadians are thriving, and would likely not be any more thriving had they been spared the chore of either fixing or eating bag lunches for the last 65 years.

So what's the point? Only that a modern, Western government that does not do every little thing for its citizens may still expect that those citizens will flourish. Critics might single out the Canadian example and argue that the otherwise comprehensive nature of the Canadian welfare state is what allows citizens to get by without suffering too much from the lack of a federal school lunch program. One could just as easily make the counter-case however, and suggest that the school lunch example demonstrates that without the other, often sacred elements of the Canadian and American welfare states, the citizens of both countries would be no less happy, healthy, and prosperous than they are right now.

The federal school lunch program in the United States costs about $10B a year. This is a small number compared to the tens and hundreds of billions that it takes to fund the big three—Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, but I’m sure that any attempt to do away with it would be met with resistance not only from a financial standpoint—“It’s only 10 billion dollars”—but also from an ethical position:  “A hot school lunch is one of those things that a modern country should provide to every child who attends school. To do less would be cruel.”  The Canadian example suggests otherwise.

It will be a huge challenge for any leader to muster the political courage and inertia required to cut or alter programs like school lunch, or Social Security, or Medicaid, and either return that money to the citizens to spend or save as they wish, or to spend it on items that fall more directly underneath the constitutional purview of the United States. Those who oppose such cuts or alterations will say that we cannot afford to burden our citizens so, or that such burdens are inconsistent with our values. But we can, and they are.

Once-Great Britain

The airwaves are full of commentary on the ongoing riots in Britain.  There are those who say it's thuggery, pure and simple, and those who say it's legitimate protest spurred by the division between haves and have nots.  Me, I'm on board with the thuggery explanation, but you have to ask yourself, how does this happen?  Don't these people care about their neighbors who own the shops and merchandise they are smashing and looting, didn't their parents teach them the difference between right and wrong, don't they have anything better to do?  The answer, I'm afraid, is no.  This is where a century of comprehensive welfare statism gets you.

At various times during the last 100 years the British government, through its policy choices, has indicated to the British people:  don't save for the future, we'll take care of you.  Don't worry about your aging parents, we'll take care of them.  Don't worry about your children's education, we'll take care of it.  Don't worry about your health care, we'll make sure you are well.  Don't worry about protecting yourself and your property, we'll manage that (and in fact, if you attempt to protect yourself and your property, we'll prosecute you).  Don't worry about your future employment, we will nationalize our largest industries and give you a job for life.  Oh, and if you don't feel like working, don't worry about that either, we'll take care of you regardless.  Don't worry about the liberties you've lost, just go along with us and we'll make sure this is a better place for all.

Some might protest that it's ridiculous to maintain that the establishment of old age pensions could in any way have contributed to the lawlessness that has been so vividly displayed over the last several days, and they're right, it's a tenuous connection.  But add together old age pensions and all the other ways that Britain no longer requires, or actively prevents her citizens from being responsible, and the connection is no longer so tenuous.  Here's how it works.  During that first year of program X, there might only be a handful of people who figure out that program X allows them to shirk some responsibility that they could not have done previously.  "I was planning for me aging mum to move in with us, but there's not really room for her, and she's got a pension now.  She can afford to keep her own place."  And then he tells two friends, and then they tell two friends, and then program Y kicks in, and 100 years on you are saddled with listlessness, envy, and disrespect (for themselves, for others, and for the rule of law) that affects millions.  Human beings respond to incentives.  If there is an incentive to behave in a fashion that requires less personal responsibility, which essentially means that the irresponsibility does not invoke a penalty, then some people will start to behave that way.  The changes might be so subtle that no one even notices their occurrence, but take two snapshots 100 years apart, and thrift, propriety, and industriousness have been replaced by waste, vulgarity, and sloth. 

The state cares about society, but it doesn't give a rat's ass about YOU.  We don't need a village, we don't need an all-encompassing safety net to protect us from what is often characterized as a malevolent universe (it's not), we need someone who cares enough about us to tell us no, to smack us with tough love when warranted, to teach us right from wrong, to tell us and to DEMONSTRATE that if we strive and work hard and plan for the future that we can be successful and happy human beings.  Traditionally, parents have fulfilled that role, but the widely varying ages of the British rioters are evidence that the rot is generations deep.

In 1960's America, one of the goals of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was to combat the systemic injustices that were being committed against black families and allow them to take their place alongside white Americans in the pursuit of happiness.  Instead, the incentives created by the various programs have wreaked societal destruction that a couple of centuries of slavery and discrimination could not accomplish.  Once-Great Britain applied the same model, and it has brought them chaos in their streets.

p.s. Here's how a pro, the eloquent and witty Mark Steyn, expresses some similar ideas.