The Crisis of the Welfare State in Europe
Milan, Italy

30 June 2003
MILAN - On 27 June, French enfant terrible Sabine Herold and Chilean free-market reformer José Piñera discussed "The Crisis of the Welfare State in Europe." The event was organized by CNE Visiting Fellow Alberto Mingardi and Leonardo Facco (www.libertari.org), the Italian publisher.

Sabine Herold is a 21-year-old Parisian student who is glavanising France's silent majority to revolt against the trade-union strikes that are crippling her country. Herold - Rédactrice en chef of the Paris-based free-market association “Liberté j'écris ton nom” - has been drawing crowds of some 80,000 in Paris. She is known as “the Joan d'Arc of the liberals” in Le Figaro and has been dubbed “Mademoiselle Thatcher” by the London Times.

A Harvard graduate, Dr. Piñera is Distinguished Fellow of the Cato Institute in Washington DC, and co-chairman of Cato's Project on Social Security Choice. As Chile's secretary of labor and social security, he was the architect of that country's successful privatization of its pension system - which has now become a world-wide model of successful reform. As founder and president of the International Center for Pension Reform, Piñera now advises governments throughout the world on the establishment of privatized pension systems.

Herold and Pinera addressed the crisis of the welfare state in Europe. Dr. Piñera described the welfare state, conceived by Bismarck as a political trick bound to collapse. As Europe's old-age population otstrips the number of young workers, the system will plunge into the bankruptcy. “A system for which something that's good for the population - to be healthier and live longer - turns to be terrible for the government, cannot be feasible and morally defendable”, Piñera said.

Pension reform à la Chile, instead, according to Dr. Piñera, will empower workers with the money they need, and will make them in a sense also capitalists: owners of capital.

Herold explained the meaning of her struggle in France. She made the case against trade unions: tyranny. The French people are simply fed up with blocked roads and parades of protesters. That's why her message is striking with tens of thousands of Frenchmen. She called on the French government to make bold reforms and abandon its cowardly political ambiguity. The time has come for courage, she said.

The meeting was introduced by CNE Visiting Fellow Alberto Mingardi, who emphasized the historical failure of the welfare state to make the poor (rather than the bureaucracy) better off.

The conference was well attended. Among those present were: Cécile Philippe, founder of the Francophone think tank Institut Molinari; EPP Youth's International Vice-President Paolo Zanetto; entrepreneurs Adriano Teso and Franco Forlin; Italian libertarian scholars Carlo Lottieri and Alessandro Vitale; Swiss economist Paolo Pamini; Il Giornale foreign affairs editor Marcello Foa; and Robi Ronza, advisor to Lombardy's government. The Q&A was lively and in several languages, thanks to translation services provided by libertarian activist Gian Turci.

Many Italian newspapers covered the event: Il Riformista, the most important daily of the intelligent left - and perhaps the trendiest newspaper in Italy - ran a prominent front-page report on the meeting and Sabine Herold. Libero, the most provocative liberal paper, published a long interview with José Piñera on the topic of pension reform by economic reporter Andrea Morigi. La Provincia di Como, Lombardy's largest daily, ran a profile of Herold by Leonardo Facco. And on July 1, Il Giornale, largest Italian right-wing daily, speaks about the meeting in a column signed by Robi Ronza.

In Italy's biggest weekly, Panorama, cited the conference in its June 27 edition. Economist Giampiero Cantoni wrote in his weekly column of Sabine Herold's efforts to reform France and commended Alberto Mingardi's recent op-ed on labor regulations in the Wall Street Journal Europe.

Thanks to Gian Turci, an audio file of the conference be be available for download soon.
We would also like to thank Paolo Pamini for the pictures on this page.

EVENT SUMMARY

EVENT SUMMARY