Selective Sustainability

Selective Sustainability 

By Lawrence W. Reed

Alarm bells are ringing across the welfare states of Europe. Or to put it another way, the long-term chickens are coming home to roost in the short-term.

British economist and charlatan John Maynard Keynes once smugly declared, “In the long run, we’re all dead anyway.” More sage advice came from the likes of American economist Howard E. Kershner: “When a self-governing people confer upon their government the power to take from some and give to others, the process will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked bare.”

When partisans of the political Left talk about environmental issues, they harp on the theme of “sustainability.” We shouldn’t do things to air and water that can’t last, they argue. Sounds reasonable. The problem is that those very same people usually support costly welfare state programs and that’s when they toss “sustainability” to the wind.

The term “welfare state” first came into use in the 1890s but the welfare it provides takes different forms depending on the country. At its worst, it’s a place where the politicians get well and the rest of us pay the fare, where welfare is considered an entitlement but a paycheck isn’t, where ever-growing bills for today’s spending get passed on to generations yet unborn, and where we’re all standing in a big circle and each person has his hands in the next guy’s pocket. Noting that it produces costly, self-serving bureaucracy, the late economist Walter Williams famously said a welfare state is like feeding the sparrows through the horses.

At its best, a welfare state just takes a little from a lot of people and gives it (minus the political brokerage fee) to a few people. If it remained like that, it might be sustainable, but the problem is, it never does. If government acts as a referee (courts) and a defender of life and property (police and national defense), it’s an affordable and necessary entity. When people embrace the idea that government should also play Santa Claus—Katie, bar the door. Everybody wants in on the act.

So don’t think that by “welfare” I’m referring to public gifts to nothing more than single mothers with starving kids. Welfare states that have been around for a generation or two practice far more redistribution (robbing Peter to pay Paul) than that. They dole out corporate welfare, student welfare, defense-establishment welfare, local-government welfare, and on and on. An “advanced” welfare state—defined as one that’s about to go broke and drag everybody down with it—will throw money around for anything and everything, at home and abroad. It’s a scandalous free-for-all, as politicians reward their friends and favored interest groups. Remember a few months ago when DOGE found that tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars were funding “Sesame Street” in Iraq, violin lessons for farmers in South America, condoms for the Taliban, and drag queen shows in Ecuador?

In an article twelve years ago, I pointed out that “No welfare state of the last 3,000 years improved a people’s character, enhanced their liberties, or put their government’s finances on a solid footing. The reality has been just the opposite, in every case, no exception.” Those who warned that benefits for one group would soon beget benefits for other groups and threaten to bankrupt the country were pilloried as mean-spirited, miserly skinflints who didn’t care about people. They should now be celebrated as prophets.

I began this essay by pointing to alarm bells from Europe. Here’s a small sample:

An ominous headline on a July 10 editorial in The Telegraph of London declared, “The Benefits State Will Destroy Britain If It Is Not Reined In.” A shocking one-tenth of the working-age population now claims to be sick or disabled, qualifying for payouts at public expense. The editorial cites Tory leader Kemi Badenoch:

…[A]s Mrs Badenoch says, we need to restore the work ethic which once drove people to “get a job, look after yourself and look after your family” as a default. Today, the outlook of a growing number appears to be instead that Britain owes them something, and that they are entitled to the fruits of the labours of their peers and neighbours.

A follow-up Telegraph editorial on August 27 expressed it more starkly:  “If wealth creators and earners continue to be fleeced to pay for unsustainable welfare payments and an unproductive public sector, then the country must inevitably go broke.”

Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, warned a year ago that the continent’s welfare state models are “utterly unsustainable.”

In the wake of World War II, Germany’s shattered and socialized economy took a sharp turn toward freedom and free markets under the guidance of Ludwig Erhard, producing the famous “German Economic Miracle.” But by the 1970s, German politicians were erecting a welfare state and buying votes with other people’s money. In late August 2025, Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced this verdict on a half century of ever-generous benefits: “The welfare state as we have it today can no longer be financed with what we can economically afford.” According to Merz’s sobering assessment, Germany has been “living beyond its means” for years.

An explosion of welfare spending, government deficits and debt are drowning the French too. Prime Minister François Bayrou resigned in September over this very issue. When he blamed excessive pensions, handouts, disability payments and other welfare spending for a budget out of control, protesters in the legislature and in the streets forced him out. In France, you can count on mobs turning out to oppose cuts; nobody shows up to demand fiscal responsibility. Writes economics editor Tim Wallace, “Not unsurprisingly, voters whose taxes paid for previous generations of pensioners find it galling to be asked to receive less themselves.”

Despite a tax burden that ranks among the highest in Europe, France is swamped with red ink. “The country’s debts are now the third largest in the world, after the US and Japan, and both of those are far larger economies,” says Matthew Lynn.

Britain’s shape isn’t much better. Writes Simon Heffer, “Labour has decided that, apparently like the people of Germany and France, the people of the United Kingdom will not tolerate cuts in their social security benefits, whatever the consequences of profligacy.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a timid cipher of a leader, possesses neither the courage nor the convictions necessary to put real restraints on British public spending.

Here in the U.S., we’ve voted ourselves into many of the same unsustainable deceptions. Social Security and Medicaid, for example, are both slated for insolvency in less than a decade.

America’s incomprehensibly large national debt is approaching $38 trillion and rising fast. Washington’s budget has been in the red in 61 of the 72 years I’ve been alive. It’s a bipartisan problem, but I can’t help but note this: The Democrats in Congress recently shut down the federal government because they want to spend another $1.5 trillion on such indefensible, vote-buying freebies like health care for illegal aliens. Do you think they are concerned about sustainability?

Back in the 1960s, scientist John B. Calhoun experimented on mice by providing them a subsidized, work-free utopia—in effect, a mouse welfare state. The tiny creatures did not live happily ever after. In reviewing his astonishing results, I wrote:

By relieving individuals of challenges, which then deprives them of purpose, the welfare state is an utterly unnatural and anti-social contrivance. In the mouse experiment, the individuals ultimately lost interest in the things that perpetuate the species. They self-isolated, over-indulged themselves, or turned to violence.

As one who never advocated for the welfare state, the obligation to explain how, when and where to stop it is not mine (though I do have opinions on that). That obligation rests with those who promoted it and still haven’t told us how to keep it from bankrupting civilization. If you know someone who talks and acts and votes like trillions in debt is no big deal, who believes government is not yet big enough, you need have a come-to-Jesus meeting with him (or her). Now.

(Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia.)