“Here’s a piece on MSNBC about a German family with four kids. Both parents are out of work, but the recession is not bothering them because the government is footing the bill.”

I wouldn’t go so far as limitedgovernment and say that it is “wrong,” a properly ordered society should make provision for economic difficulties to protect the vulnerable, but I rejoin limitedgovernment when I say that handing government that function is unwise and counterproductive from a communal perspective. Government intervention depersonalizes the expression of need; demanding a check from a functionary has an entirely different quality from asking your family, friends, neighbors, church, or town. The Depersonalization undermines moral hazard and quickly deteriorates into entitlement. The government welfare apparatus is also subject to political manipulation in a way that local sources of benevolence generally are immune.

Robert Nisbet wrote extensively on how the modern state competes with community for function and authority in the lives of individuals. The more function government can strip from communities, in this case economic support during economic difficulties, the greater its authority and relevance in the lives of its citizens. The traditional sources of benevolence from which the function has been stripped lose authority and relevance, and wither.

Circling around to limitedgovernment and churches, its seems to me that the European model suffers from a surfeit of state intervention and a deficit of religious practice and its attendant institutions. The demographic crisis indicates to me a moral/spiritual crisis more than a material one. We’re back to a word Nisbet frequently used: anomie – purposelessness.

Before big government and in the days of small churches, people tended (there are of course exceptions) to take care of themselves, their families, and their communities. The church was involved, but most churches were smaller and had smaller budgets, so the members of the church had to get directly involved in helping.

In response to your statement: “I’d like to think that socially concerned restrictions and opportunities are not at the root of the cause behind these different trends in Europe, but I suppose I have to be open to the possibility of being proven wrong.”

I do not mean to imply by my reference to the demographic bomb that “socially concerned restrictions and opportunities” are the root cause. I’m merely asking an honest question of an informed audience: despite the strong communal dynamic I have personally witnessed in most of Europe, a dynamic I find sadly lacking or at least in a state of advanced deterioration in much of America, Europeans are choosing to forego marriage and children at unprecedented rates.

To make matters worse, the European welfare state, generally speaking, is constructed much as Social Security in this country – the young pay for the old. Within one generation, there will be too few of the former to pay for the latter, and due to the severity of the birth dearth, no reasonable adjustment of taxes or benefits can fill the gap. The problem is much more severe than the insolvency of SSA and Medicare.

Neither the consequences of this impending crisis nor the currently generous payments and subsidies from some governments to encourage reproduction (marriage optional, of course), nor the strong communal dynamic is enough to promote family formation to any significant degree. Why not? Where is the weakness in the European communal dynamic? It’s complicated, I’m sure.

Could it be that the state has so thoroughly insinuated itself into otherwise private institutions (again, family first and foremost, but also established churches, etc.) that it has left them desiccated, mere husks resembling their traditional form but devoid of any substance? This seems to me to be an essential question for communitarians/traditionalists, etc. , one that must answered, not just asked. As attractive as it seems on the surface (I’m referring to the communal dynamic and human-scale living, not the leviathan), there is something catastrophically wrong with the European model. We can praise its attributes only if we admit and attempt to diagnose its flaws. Otherwise, we’re headed down the same suicidal path.

A quote from a German official justifying this: the state has a responsibility to protect people from idiotic forenames.”

I think this may be taking civic order a bit too far.

“We don’t pay anything for any of (our) medicines, for doctor’s visits, nothing,” Sarah said, adding that she worried about her sister in Detroit, who had had several periods without health insurance.

When the government takes our money to pay for things that the politicians decide we need, we lose the opportunity to do with our money what we consider a priority. Consider Social Security (Socialist Insecurity) and Medicare. The combined “contributions” from an employer and employee are 15.3% of a workers wages/salary. Consider what a person could do if they received that money instead of the government taking it.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30363790/

Is this a bad thing?

That being said, when it comes to how cities/towns work, many American cities/towns have been designed/redesigned around the automobile. In Germany, many of the cities/towns are older, and they have not been changed significantly with the advent of the automobile. I would not try to convince every American to live in towns and cities, but for those who do live in towns and cities, we could learn something from German cities/towns as we develop/redevelop them.

At the same time, as we have created government entitlements, we are losing much of the spirit of the “rugged individualist.” Because of the size of our country, there is room for all kinds of way of life. However, regardless of whether an American chooses to live in an urban area, in a small city, in a small town, or in a rural area, I believe that the way of life for each will be improved if we begin to remove money/power from the federal government and return it to people.

I do NOT want to live in town. I want to live where I have no visible neighbors. And we have a country filled with vast empty spaces, there’s no reason on earth cram us into elbow-smaking closeness.

Perhaps Germans think that’s fine. I don’t. I would hate it with every ounce of my being. To be so constricted by a society would drive me insane. It defies the very essence of me, which is to be able to change, adapt, renew, move on, innovate, explore.

You all miss how much that has benefitted our nation and our future and our past. We’re personally strong and independent, because we can be, because many of us are. That’s why we can’t be knocked down, that’s why dictators do not arise (or haven’t yet), and why we carry our own guns.

I do not need, nor do I want a check for my kid’s books or diapers or clothes. I need to be tempered and hardened by the desperate struggle to survive. We ALL need to be beaten down and then claw, struggle, and reach our way back by our own efforts. We need to be a nation of durable, tough, resilient individuals who cannot be defeated by hardship. We need to have to learn to be “Me against the world” and not be cowed or live in fear of hardship or disaster.

That’s what makes Americans who they are. That’s why we did so much in such a short period of time compared to Europe. And we need to be that tough and hard again.

Since Germany is getting credit for making the author conservative, and since Germany was responsible for the war, Germany should take part of the blame for creating sprawl and destroying place in the United States.

Germany has approximately 80 million people in an area of approximately 138,000 sq. miles. Germany is a mostly homogeneous society – 91.5% of the population is German.

The United States has approximately 300 million people in an area of approximately 3.8 million square miles.

The United States of today is much different today than it was a century ago. In the last century the federal government has grown from 2.5% of GDP to 20% (and rising) of GDP. The federal government also built the interstates. Most of the motorways in Europe were build away from city centers. In the United States, many of the interstates bisected cities.

It is not coincidental that the sense of place has been lost as power has been centralized in Washington DC.

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“Equipped with railroad transportation and situated amid a fertile farming region, Emporia thereafter prospered as a trading center. Gas for illumination was installed in 1880; streetcars drawn by mules were put into operation the following year; and in 1885 an electric light plant was established.”

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This was 25 years after the first white settlement, and contemporary with the epitome of the Wild West in Dodge City. The cowboy era was actually quite short, and most cities were trying to achieve a European-style regard for community life, with utilities and transportation available to all. (I’m pretty sure the founders of Emporia wouldn’t have regarded the streetcar riders as “parasites”, as one commenter elsewhere on FPR said yesterday… the Ayn Rand version of go-it-alone-ness is a very recent phenomenon!)

I am interested to see the “Letter from a Traditional Conservative” states the fundamental principle of conservatism as “Man is intrinsically a social or political animal; his individual identity is formed by, tied to, and fulfilled only in, community.”
This plus God is precisely the Orthodox Christian belief.

As a moderate social democrat, I’ve always considered myself a conservative too: but that’s not comprehensible in the US context. Thank you for this, it gives one to think.

I wrote about a short German sojourn here,
http://dkretzmann.googlepages.com/darmstadt2004
which echoes many of Patrick’s notes.

When the Government of the United States decided to hitch its war wagon to the Military -Industrial Complex, it was forced to abandon the kinds of civic investment that Europe was allowed, once freed from its own defensive responsibilities. We talk a good line of hardy independence but have created a generation of arch-dependents who worship a State that exalts power but schizophrenically rebukes itself with regularity . There is so much bait and switch going on that the public begins to lose track of where the bait begins and the switch stops. As such, we are never able to actually arrive at a conversation….let alone a consensus of what kind of ethical and built environment we want besides the constant droning of “individual freedom”. Regulations become ends in themselves in this country , never a fundamental reason shall they meet. Laws are then promulgated on who moans the loudest or donates to the political campaign the most. Because of the rootlessness we have adopted and the erosion of clan it entails, everything is essentially a team sport of popular cultural creation and we cheer the spectacle and think it a community and it is indeed one ..a vicarious community.

Personally, I want to be left alone when I want to be left alone but find a stimulating community when I want that. As someone who clearly detests the current …what is it? oh yes, “government”…I harbor sympathies toward the Libertarians Mr. Medaille abjures but I also detect no small whiff of grapeshot in their rhetoric ….of the kind that makes last stands against itself because it has disdained community and communal action for so long it thinks any communal action is the enemy. We don’t seem to be able to find that balance in this country over the noise of marketing cant. The great God “Efficiency” is paramount and it’s avenging angel “External costs” does the dirty work. As Toqueville observed, physicality and motion replaces introspection and sentiment. “Show Me the Money”…a not altogether bad credo to be applied where prudent becomes the end all of cultural expression

There is no organized force with enough credibility to actually assess the important lessons of the current “crisis” and so we miss a sterling opportunity to actually re-direct into a more productive balance of both independent liberty and communal joy or love and so will miss the potential gargantuan…and truly authentic and egalitarian economic productivity of just such a redirection. Instead, like …who was it…? Henry Adams ? …somebody help me out here….who suggested that in times of great change, the individual citizen is smashed “like insects”. Keep an eye out for that bottom of a foot coming at you from that place which likes to remind you it’s protecting you as it blows up places several time zones distant. It is called a Conserviliberal and it has two heads and a bottomless appetite with one orifice trailing a plume of empty rhetoric.