The European Union’s finances are in a dismal state, and are requiring governments to revaluate the “welfare state.” Samuel Gregg articulates in his article appearing in The American Spectator, “Europe’s Not-So-Revolutionary Youth,” that a youth movement called les indignés or los indignados, depending on where you are, is resisting the reforms being proposed:
This time, however, things are different. With barely-disguised reluctance, governments across Western Europe are proceeding with relatively minor reforms aimed at reducing the European welfare state’s costs. But les indignés are protesting not only the pain of change — they also clearly resent the changes themselves.
Of course there’s an anarchist fringe to these youth protests — the ski-masked individuals who routinely join any demonstration to exult in the joy of physical violence against police and random destruction of private property. But by and large, the indignant ones want exactly what their parents and grandparents regard as their birthright: not-too-exacting jobs-for-life, free health-care, state-guaranteed minimal-incomes, six weeks paid annual vacation, early-retirement, and generous state-provided pensions.
In other words, they want Social Europe. Los indignados don’t, however, apparently comprehend just how much this economic system has contributed to their present plight.
Gregg further explains that while the youth are fighting for a return to the status-quo in Europe, demographic trends undermine their case:
Many young Europeans are also remarkably unaware that Europe’s demographic trends are further tilting the scales against them. The below-replacement birth-rates prevailing in almost every European nation will result in the proportion of active workers to retirees across the EU shifting over the next twenty-five years from a 2:1 ratio to a 1:1 ratio.
This makes it unlikely that even present reforms, such as raising retirement ages, can forestall an eventual implosion of Europe’s welfare states — a process that, at present rates, will be underway long before les indignés come even close to receiving their first state-pension check.
Nor do los indignados appear to realize that any chance they might have to force through liberalizing economic reforms via democratic means is weakening by the day.
The same demographic developments that will severely compromise their financial prospects are also reducing young Europeans to the status of a minority in the world’s most rapidly aging continent. This progressively diminishes their ability to out-vote Europe’s millions-strong (and growing) gerontocracy who, AARP-like, appear quietly content to live off their children’s future.
Los Indignados should be angry about the present situation they are faced with. However, a return to the status-quo fails to acknowledge that it is the status-quo that put Europe in its current financial hardship. Instead, los indignados should be fighting for more dramatic change moving Europe away from the welfare state.
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