Welfare State

London. -- From the streets of Moscow to the debate about U.S.-Mexican commercial relations, people are flinching from the consequences of accelerating change.The 10th decade of this century of rampant statism has now seen fighting in Moscow, the city that was, from 1917 through 1991, capital of the most virulent statism. The uprising by Boris Yeltsin's enemies has been partly the fury of the old communist ruling class, and partly rekindled nationalism, a facet of the old tribalism resurgent in what no longer is spoken of as ''the new Europe.

LONDON -- Britain's Labor Party shed another layer of its welfare past with a stern message to single parents last night: Get to work or get married before having children.With Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair quashing a rebellion from his party's left wing, the House of Commons approved a bill to reduce welfare payments to single parents.The action was Blair's boldest bid to refashion the remnants of Britain's Labor-built, cradle-to-grave welfare state.Blair, who claims to represent "New Labor," wants people to take responsibility for their lives -- and actions.

WASHINGTON -- The British historian Paul Johnson was in Washington last month to address a gathering at the Library of Congress on the subject ''Calvin Coolidge and the Last Arcadia.'' The visit was timely, coming as it did in the heat of the war between the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress over whether and how to balance the budget.''We have too much legislation by clamor, by tumult and by pressure,'' said Coolidge more than seven decades ago. Who could disagree?In normal times, Coolidge believed, minimal government must be the norm.

HOUSE Speaker Newt Gingrich speaking recently to the National Governors Association:"And it seems to me it's true not because of a political ideology or a political movement but because of five large realities that you face at the governor's level, we face in the Congress, the president faces in the White House, the cities and counties face at their level. . ."The Alvin and Heidi Toffler model of a third wave of change. I mean, go back and look at government just prior to the rise of agriculture, then look at government during the agricultural era, what they called the first wave.

PARIS - With a protest sign and a wide grin, Rachiol Boulaouane stepped out of the crowd of marching strikers last week and summed up the average French worker's view of the government's effort to solve a pension crisis that threatens to swallow the economy. "Something has to be done, yeah," said Boulaouane, 30, who cleans housing projects for the city, "but I don't want to keep working until I have no teeth." Like every French worker, public and private, Boulaouane labors 35 hours a week and gets at least five weeks of paid vacation a year.

THE DIRE plight of public housing project residents is perhaps the most visible manifestation of the failure of theAmerican welfare state. The Poverty Pentagon -- the army of bureaucrats, social workers, politicians and academicians who support the welfare state -- will never admit it has failed. It will only try to cover up its blunders with new programs. A good example is the federal Housing and Urban Development's Moving to Opportunity program, which will give victims of the welfare state who reside in public housing projects certificates or vouchers so they can move into more affluent neighborhoods.

New York. -- Broadway Presbyterian Church, located in uptown New York near Columbia University, has always had a place in its heart for the poor people in its community. That's why the church started a soup kitchen in 1980. The indigent, many of whom were drug-addicted and incapable of holding down a job, would come to the church to eat.Other organizations, including student groups at Columbia and nearby Union Theological Seminary, also volunteered at the soup kitchen. Before long up to 250 people were eating lunch in the church's basement every day. It had become a sprawling volunteer enterprise.

The late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously commented, "It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state." As we've noticed in recent years, what was obvious to Mr. Friedman and indeed to the great majority of American citizens is apparently a mystery to many of our political leaders, Democrat and Republican alike. They have not effectively addressed the issue of the ongoing invasion of the United States from south of the border by millions of destitute Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans and other Central Americans desperate for jobs that pay a living wage.

Washington -- THE COLLAPSE of Bill Clinton's far-reaching blueprint for a government-orchestrated national health program into much lesser legislation can be described best as: a) a historic achievement, nonetheless; b) a tragedy for the middle class; c) so much of a political face-saver that we'd be better off starting over; or d) all of the above?Take your time, because economists and historians will be debating this for years. But "all of the above" does have a certain resonance. Important legislation may still be enacted.

The greatest moral imperative we face is replacing the welfare state with an opportunity society.For every day that we allow the current conditions to continue, we are condemning the poor -- and particularly poor children -- to being deprived of their basic rights as Americans.The welfare state reduces the poor from citizens to clients. It breaks up families, minimizes work incentives, blocks people from saving and acquiring property and overshadows dreams of a promised future with a present despair born of poverty, violence and hopelessness.