ECONOMIST Tyler Cowen is visiting Denmark, munching herring and musing on the Scandinavian welfare state:

Does immigration bring Nordic welfare states to the verge of collapse? They all seem to think so, but I've long found this fear puzzling. These states could solve many of their fiscal problems by either cutting taxes/spending a few percentage points, or by moving to complete dual benefit status (read: non-whites receive less money). No matter what you think of those ideas, they would stave off fiscal crisis. The trick is that Americans and many of the Nordics have such different senses of what counts as a major political problem. For better or worse, we are used to tolerating waste and disorder. They fall apart if even a single piece of the machinery of government is out of order. (Similarly, the Japanese are aghast over tiny tears in the fabric of social order.) So if someone is collecting benefits "who shouldn't be," it threatens their entire basis of social and legal organization. I, as a New Jersey-bred American think "too bad, but big deal, what else is new?" Would it help them to be more like me? Can they simply overlook these instances of immigrant abuse? Maybe not. If they were more like me, they wouldn't be them in the first place.

I diagnose the issue as a a cultural disconnect between the ostensible justification for the welfare state, and the actual operation.

The conscious justification is "We need to take care of the needy". But of course, if this were the actual logic, no Western government would spend any money on domestic poverty programmes; they would ship all the money abroad to countries where poverty is really dire, and let the people at home, who at least have things like clean water to drink, shift for themselves.

The actual pattern of thought is "We need to take care of our needy compatriots", with a much weaker "We'd like to take care of other needy people, money and time permitting".

But note that there are two definitions of "compatriots". One is "people who share my culture and heritage"; the other is "people who are legally entitled to live (and/or vote) within the geographic and political boundaries of my country". Citizens tend to respond most deeply to the first sort of logic, but politicians, unsurprisingly, respond to the second. The welfare state is a means of expressing solidarity with people who are mostly just like you are. Other people with different values cannot be trusted not to abuse the system; worse, they don't much care what you think of them, and so they are immune from the social pressure that regulates consumption of benefits in homogenous communities.

In Scandinavia, luckily, the two definitions of "compatriot" largely describe the same group. But immigration is changing this; it drives a wedge between the two definitions, ultimately undercutting support for the public institutions Danes cherish. Americans don't get too worked up at the thought that there are freeloaders on the welfare system . . . but the price of that casual attitude is that no one supports a very generous welfare system.

But, national and genetic solidarity having gone somewhat out of fashion, no one can say "welfare for Danes". Immigrants have to be kept out, most of them worse off than they would be in Denmark with no government benefits, so that Danes can preserve the public fiction that they are just as interested in people without Danish blood.

I am under the impression that Mr Cowen also believes that this applies even to heartless America, which cannot let Mexican immigrants in even without benefits, because Americans could not tolerate the enclaves of gross poverty that would rapidly appear near American cities.

Update A reader points me to this article from the Wall street Journal, which indicates that free riding isn't so well controlled by social sanction even in homogenous countries: