Promiscuity, drug abuse, tolerance of crime and other 1960s values produce social problems that necessitate bigger and bigger government interventions.
”A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year. Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers… Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit... The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.”
- Clare Chapman, The Daily Telegraph, 20th February 2005.
This extraordinary story from Germany is another unhappy stop on the road dictated by sixties socialism. The story of sixties socialism began in the era of Woodstock. Then a new generation demanded that the state pay for its right to dodge military service, use drugs and sleep with whomever they fancied. Fifty years later, in Berlin, the state has insisted that the right to welfare become dependent upon pursuing 1960s behaviours.
The victims of the 1960s
The moral crimes of the 1960s were not victimless. Children never prospered in the anarchic classroom experiments conducted by that era’s educationalists. Children and lonely old folk have been the major victims of the sixties – abandoned by a generation that pursued adult pleasures but never reached true adulthood.
The values of the 1960s fed big government
The values of the 1960s and big government were made for each other. Sixties socialism simultaneously permitted and paid for the behaviours of the 1960s. Sixties behaviours created the appetite for more and more state (‘pick-up-the-pieces’) interventions. The sixties created more social needs and undermined society’s capacity to cope with those needs. Drugs were tolerated and the state paid for unemployment benefit and rehab. Men deserted the children they produced and the welfare state stepped in as an inferior but expensive-for-taxpayers breadwinner.
In a something-must-be-done democracy the state will always give in to popular demands for government action. Small government libertarianism (SGL) - and its notion of washing government’s hands of self-destructive behaviours and of those behaviours’ consequences – can’t work in a democracy where most voters demand that serious ills be healed. The SGL’s vision of a naturally-adjusting brave new world, where drug users and sexual experimenters were left to face up to their choices, simply wouldn’t be allowed by voters. Sixties socialism’s alliance of big government and harmful behaviours may produce absurdities - like that facing Berlin’s 25-year-old waitress - but it is more honest than the oxymoronic idea of small government libertarianism.
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