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security, and, as a result, thousands died. On the fourth plane, Todd Beamer and others reclaimed those rights and demonstrated that they could exercise them more efficiently than government. The Cult of Regulation failed, but the great American virtues of self-reliance and innovation saved the lives of thousands: "Let's roll!" as Mr. Beamer told his fellow passengers.

By contrast, on March 11, 2002, six months to the day after Mohammed Atta and Marwanal-Shehhi died flying their respective planes into World Trade Center Tower One and Tower Two, their flight school in Florida received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service informing it that Mr. Atta and Mr. al-Shehhi's student visas had been approved. Even killing thousands of people wasn't enough to impede Mr. Atta's smooth progress through a lethargic bureaucracy. And the bureaucrats' defense--which boiled down to: don't worry, we're only issuing visas to famous dead terrorists, not obscure living ones--is one that Americans largely have to take on trust. A furious President Bush insisted that the INS take decisive action against those responsible, which it did, moving Janis Sposato

"sideways" to the post of "Assistant Deputy Executive Associate' Commissioner for Immigration Services." I don't know what post she was moved sideways from--possibly Associate Executive Deputy Assistant Commissioner. Happily, since then, the INS has changed its name to some other acronym and ordered up a whole new set of business cards, extra-large if Ms. Sposato's title is anything to go by.

Given the difficulty of reforming the torpid bureaucratic culture, the best we can hope for is to constrain its size--and leave enough space so that a nimble and innovative citizenry don't degenerate into mere subjects of an overbearing state. In 2004, Wired magazine ran an interesting featurette about a fellow called Hans Monderman, a highway engineer in northern Holland for the previous three decades. A year or two back, he'd had an epiphany. As Wired's Tom McNichol puts it:

"Build roads that seem dangerous, and they'll be safer." In other words, all the stuff on the streets--signs for everything every five yards, yellow lines, pedestrian crossings, stoplights, crash barriers, bike lanes--all that junk clogging up the highway, by giving you the illusion of security, in fact makes driving more dangerous. The town of Christianfield in Denmark embraced the Monderman philosophy, removed all the traffic signs and signals from its most dangerous intersection, and thereby cut the number of serious accidents down to zero. These days, when you tootle toward the junction, there's no instructions from the Department of Transportation to tell you what to do. You have to figure it out for yourself, so you approach it cautiously and with an eye on what the other chaps in the vicinity are up to.

Mr. Monderman's thesis feels right to me--that by creating the illusion of security you relieve the citizen of the need to make his own judgments. Howard Zinn, in his introduction to Cindy Sheehan's book Dear President Bush, pens this paean to the plucky underdog: "A box-cutter can bring down a tower. A poem can build up a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution."

But the only reason "a box-cutter can bring down a tower" is because on September 11

our defenses against such a threat were exclusively the province of the state. If nineteen punks with box-cutters had tried to pull some stunt in the parking lot of a sports bar, they'd have been beaten to a pulp. The airline cabin, however, is the most advanced model of the modern social-democratic state, the sky-high version of the wildest dreams of big government; it's Massachusetts in cloud-cuckoo land. So on September 11 on those first three flights the cabin crews followed all those Federal Aviation Administration guidelines
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from the seventies. By the time the fourth plane got into trouble, the passengers knew the government wasn't up there with them. And, within ninety minutes of the first flight hitting the tower, the heroes of Flight 93 had figured out what was going on and came up with a way to stop it.

That's been my basic rule of thumb since September 11: anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing, not just for the war on terror but for the national character in a more general sense. Charles Clarke, formerly Britain's home secretary, gave a revealing glimpse into the big-government mentality in a column for the Times defending the latest allegedly necessary security measure: "10 cards will potentially make a difference to any area of everyday life where you already have to prove your identity--such as opening a bank account, going abroad on holiday, claiming a benefit, buying goods on credit and renting a video."

"Renting a video"? That sounds about right. When you go to Blockbuster, you'll need your national 10 card. But if you're an Algerian terrorist cell coming in on the Eurostar from Paris to blow up Big Ben, you won't. And its requirement for the routine transactions of daily life--"opening a bank account ... buying goods on credit"--will have the same impact as all those street signs and traffic lights at that Danish intersection: it will relieve bank managers and store clerks of the need to use their own judgment in assessing the situation. You'd have to have an awful lot of faith in government to think that's a good thing. Britain's religious "hate crimes" law is another example of excessive street signage applied to the byways of society. It attempts to supplant human judgment with government management: the multicultural state is working out so well that we can no longer be trusted to regulate our own interactions with our neighbors. Islam, unlike Anglicanism, is an explicitly political project: sharia is a legal system, but, unlike English Common Law or the Napoleonic Code, for the purposes of public debate it will henceforth enjoy the special protection of Her Majesty's Government. Given that the emerging Muslim lobby groups are already the McDonald's coffee plaintiff of ethno-cultural grievance-mongers, you can be certain they'll make full use of any new law. Political debate in Europe is already hedged in by excessive squeamishness: Holland's "immigration problem" is a Muslim problem, France's "youth problem" is a Muslim problem, the "terrorism threat" that necessitates those British ID cards is in reality an Islamic threat. How is preventing honest discussion of the issue going to make citizens any safer? The term "nanny state" hardly covers a society where you need retinal-scan ID in order to rent Mary Poppins but you're liable for prosecution if you express your feelings too strongly after the next bombing.

CRADLE TO GRAVE

Restoring the balance between the state and the citizen is most urgent when it comes to reversing the biggest structural defect of the developed world. You'll recall that during the Iraq war, we heard a lot of talk about ancient Mesopotamia--the land of the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Hittites--being "the cradle of civilization." That's a very pertinent formulation: without a cradle, it's hard to sustain a civilization. Demography is not necessarily destiny: today's high Muslim birth rates will fall, and probably fall dramatically, as the Catholic birth rates in Italy and Quebec have. But it's no consolation that Muslim birth rates will be as bad as yours in 2050 if yours are off the cliff right now. The last people around in any numbers will determine the kind of society we live in, and right now the last people around Europe will be Muslim.

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For many nations, it's already too late. As Romania and other Communist countries belatedly discovered, even a repressive dictatorship has a hard job coercing the populace into breeding once they've lost the habit. When I've mentioned the birth dearth in newspaper columns on abortion, pro-"choice" readers have insisted it's due to other factors--the generally declining fertility rates that affect all materially prosperous societies, or the high taxes that make large families prohibitively expensive in materially prosperous societies. But this is a bit like arguing over which came first, the chicken or the egg--or, in this case, which came first, the lack of eggs or the scraggy old chicken-necked women desperate for one designer baby at the age of forty-eight. Whether or not Russia, Japan, and Europe's fertility woes derive from abortion, what should be obvious is that the way the abortion issue is posited--as an issue of personal choice--is in and of itself symptomatic of the existential crisis of the dying West. In a traditional society--a seventeenth-century farming village, say-children are an advantage, not just economically but in more general social ways. We're not doing a lot of seventeenth-century farming these days, so we need to find a way to restore advantage to parenthood in the context of a modern society.

All we know is that the modern social-democratic state is not the answer. The EU

figures it needs another fifty million immigrants in the next few years just to maintain a big enough working population to fund the lavish social programs its vast retired army of baby boomers expects to enjoy. And the only available sources of immigrants are North Africa and the Middle East. Whether these are the chaps to keep Pierre and Gerhard in the style to which they've become accustomed is highly doubtful: according to some Scandinavian statistics, 40 percent of those on welfare are immigrants. Elsewhere, the picture is similar: welfare regimes work a lot better for their Islamist beneficiaries than for native Continental ones.

When one contemplates the demographic catastrophe, it's easy to say, well, maybe we should reduce the tax burden on young fertile adults, make it easier for them to afford to buy a home and start a family. But the economic argument is, in the larger scheme, marginal. In traditional rural societies, children were a necessary insurance for one's old age: by the time you were too stooped and worn to plough the field and hunt for dinner, Junior would do it for you. Today, when you're stooped and worn (and, in fact, long before that point), the state steps in to take care of you. Reconnecting nanny-state populations with crossgenerational solidarity requires much more than the marginal tax breaks the Portuguese government announced or the nine thousand bucks the Russian state is now offering for second children. The most important action in reacquainting individuals with a larger sense of life is the one that governments recoil from: shrink the state. They could at least reorient as many benefits as possible toward children: In America, a lot of welfare is inadvertently natalist (albeit in not always helpful ways, like single motherhood) in the sense that for most of the big-time benefit gravy you need babies. But those nations farther down the death spiral will need to embrace serious uber-natalism: for example, if you've got four dependents, your taxable income ought to be divided by five; an employed man with a stay-at-home wife and three children pays a fifth of what an employed single man does. If they both earn $50,000, the swingin' bachelor pays tax on $50,000, which still leaves enough for him to hit the singles bars; the married stiff pays tax on $10,000, which makes a family affordable.

Another constraint on family size is available housing. Acre for acre, America is the cheapest developed country in which to buy a big home with plenty of space for plenty of kids. That helps explain why Canada's fertility rate is so European: partly for reasons of
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climate but partly because of more recent Trudeaupian social developments and immigration trends, the Northern Dominion's population is more concentrated than America's--i.e., more urban. If you were designing a "master plan" for Canada, you'd want to provide some way of encouraging still fecund young couples to move from their poky Toronto and Vancouver apartments to the great outdoors. In Western Europe, the cost of housing is extraordinarily high. Whenever I read about the ever-larger number of Italians in early middle age still living with mom and dad, I'm reminded of an old Benny Hill sketch in which he and his dolly bird are bikers who can't get public housing. The BBC interviewer says, "Why don't you move back in with your parents?" Benny grunts, "We would do, but they've moved back in with theirs."

That gets closer to the nub of the matter. It's not just a question of tax breaks and affordable housing. The chief characteristic of our age is "deferred adulthood." All over North America and Europe there are millions of people going to college for no good reason. Certainly, there's no reason why the sum of knowledge the average American has accumulated by the time he's completed a bachelor's degree should take twenty years to inculcate. We need to redirect the system to telescope education into a much shorter period. Instead, we've implicitly accepted that our bodies mature much earlier than our greatgrandparents' but that our minds don't. We enter adolescence much sooner and leave it much later--in some cases, not until middle age. We've created a world where a thirty-oneyear-old European male can stroll into a nightclub, tell the babes he lives at his mom and dad's place in the same bedroom he's slept in since he was in diapers--and he can still walk out with a hot-looking date. This guy would have been a laughingstock at any other point in human history.

The state and its citizens would be better off if we gave students a terrific high school education and then let 'em get on with earning money so they can afford to have two or three kids in their twenties instead of one fertility-treatment special delivery in late middle age. It won't be easy to do that, particularly in America, where schools are a bastion of overunionization dedicated to expanding their privileges and protections at the expense of their pupils. But our refusal to rein in deferred adulthood is one reason why developed societies are ever more dependent on unsustainable levels of immigration. That includes the United States, where the Hispanicization of large parts of the country is setting up America for the most destabilizing aspects of bicultural and bilingual societies.

By 2015, almost every viable political party in the West will be natalist, and the cannier ones will be supporting policies--like a flat tax--that help restore the societal architecture vandalized by careless governmental social engineering. As much as Europe and Islamism, social and fiscal policy are now a matter of national survival. In the end, it's not about cash: after all, materialism and self-gratification are why Eutopians gave up on the future in the first place. The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people's pockets but to put more responsibility in people's pockets.