Liberalism, socialism and the modern welfare state

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Welfare state. Concept of government in which the state plays a key role in the

protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens.

It is based on the principles of equality of opportunity, equitable distribution

of wealth, and public responsibility for those unable to avail themselves of the

minimal provisions for a good life. The general term may cover a variety of forms

of economic and social organization.

A fundamental feature of the welfare state is social insurance, a provision common

to most advanced industrialized countries (e.g., National Insurance in the United

Kingdom and Social Security in the United States). Such insurance is usually financed

by compulsory contributions and is intended to provide benefits to persons and families

during periods of greatest need. It is widely recognized, however, that in practice

these cash benefits fall considerably short of the levels intended by the designers

of the plans.

The welfare state also usually includes public provision of basic education, health

services, and housing (in some cases at low cost or without charge).

Encyclopedia Britannica

Following are some articles and thoughts pertaining to liberalism, socialism and the modern welfare state:

Imprimis The Worldview that Makes the Underclass (Do Google search)

Imprimis Race Relations and Law Enforcement

Facts of Life

Welfare and the Facts of Life

Welfare — like people riding in a cart

Dilemmas. Societal problems. Socialism in America.

Facts of Life

The welfare state. Is it wise in its shielding of the foolish from the consequences of foolishness?

The proper and just solution to the welfare problem

Liberalism is evil

The case against socialism

Socialism destroys the incentive to produce, dampens the human

spirit and results, ultimately, in less for everyone.

David Limbaugh

The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to

production. And the way to do that, as the modern world has

discovered, is through the system known as capitalism -- the

system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise.

Henry Hazlitt

Once we realize that government doesn't work, we will stop

dreaming that this or that social problem can be solved by

passing a law - or by creating a new government program - or by

electing someone who will make Washington more efficient or

cost-conscious.

Harry Browne

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the

evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.

Thomas B. Reed

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man,

which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.

G. Gordon Liddy

It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal

system to protect a citizen from himself.

Justice Casey Percel

Different people rise to the top under socialism than under

capitalism. The higher on the socialist hierarchy you look, the

more you will find people who are too incompetent to do the job

they are supposed to do.

Hans-Herman Hoppe

The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by

men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Louis Brandeis

Big-government conservatives share a common arrogance with

contemporary liberalism. They are convinced that they know

best what is best for every American and because they know

best, they should guide the rest of us in the proper direction.

Michael D. Tanner

If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you

are not free at all.

Jacob G. Hornberger

To finance "entitlement" programs, the government threatens

force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are

people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those

who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy?

John Stossel

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.

It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

William Pitt

Once Congress establishes that one person can live at the

expense of another, it pays for everyone to try to do so.

Walter Williams

Government doesn't work. You work, I work, Federal Express

works, Alcoholics Anonymous works, but government doesn't.

Harry Browne

Can anyone recall the last time a government bureaucracy declared

that it had fulfilled its mission and now should be abolished?

Michael D. Tanner

Most change in America doesn't come from politicians. It comes

from inventing things and creating. The telephone, the

telegraph, the computer, all those things didn't come from

government. Our world is going to get better and better, as

long as we keep the politicians from screwing it up.

David Boaz

Government schools can go for decades delivering low-quality

services, and what is the result? The people who manage it

earn higher pay. It's nearly impossible to fire the

incompetents. And, taxpayers, who support the service, are

given higher tax bills.

Walter Williams

Once we realize that government doesn't work, we'll know that

the only way to improve government is by reducing its size --

by doing away with laws, by getting rid of programs, by making

government spend and tax less, by reducing government as far as

we can.

Harry Browne

The world has always been betrayed not by scoundrels but by

decent men with bad ideas.

Sudney J. Harris

The first socialists were the intellectuals; they, and not the

masses, are the backbone of Socialism.

Ludwig von Mises

Compassion is good but politicians have turned compassion into

the welfare state.

Thomas Sowell

We know that welfare is a failure. It has neither reduced

poverty nor made the poor self-sufficient. It has torn at the

social fabric of the country and been a significant factor in

increasing out-of-wedlock births with all their attendant

problems. It has weakened the work ethic and contributed to

rising crime rates. Most tragically of all, the pathologies

it engenders have been passed on from parent to child, from

generation to generation.

Michael D. Tanner

The only way to break the cycle of unwed motherhood, fatherless

children, poverty, crime, and welfare is to recognize that

welfare causes more problems than it cures.

David Boaz

The State is absolutely indispensable to the preservation of

law and order, and the promotion of peace and social

cooperation. What is unnecessary and evil, what abridges the

liberty and threatens the true welfare of the individual, is

the State that has usurped excessive powers and grown beyond

its legitimate functions - the super-State, the socialist State,

the redistributive State, in brief, the ironically misnamed

"welfare State".

Henry Hazlitt

If the history of welfare teaches us anything, it teaches us

that government money is as addictive as any narcotic.

Michael D. Tanner

The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-

addicted criminals and ne'er-do-wells. It has also,

incidently, burdened what was the world's biggest, most dynamic

economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly

expensive state machine.

Martin Durkin

The same government that requires a taxpaying citizen to

document every statement on his tax return decrees that

questioning a welfare applicant demeans and humiliates him.

Ronald Reagan

The vital consideration of incentives is almost systematically

overlooked in the proposals of agitators for more and bigger

government welfare schemes. We should all be concerned about

the plight of the poor and unfortunate. But the hard two-part

question that any plan for relieving poverty must answer is:

How can we mitigate the penalties of failure and misfortune

without undermining the incentives to effort and success.

Henry Hazlitt

Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has

done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not

have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black

family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien

to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and

achievement.

Walter Williams

When have handouts ever worked? In the United States, we

learned that welfare for our own citizens not only turned into

a debilitating crutch, it created a more or less permanent

underclass.

Linda Chavez

When any welfare scheme is being proposed, its political

sponsors always dwell on what a generous and compassionate

government should pay to Paul; they neglect to mention that

this additional money must be seized from Peter.

Henry Hazlitt

The tendency of welfare spending in the United States has been

to increase at an exponential rate.

Henry Hazlitt

Once the premise is accepted that poverty is never the fault of

the poor but the fault of "society", or of "the capitalist

system", then there is no definable limit to be set on relief,

and politicians who want to be elected or reelected will

compete with each other in proposing new "welfare" programs to

fill some hitherto "unmet need".

Henry Hazlett

Have you noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their

own reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform.

The very fact that they're always busy "reforming" is an

implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50

times.

Lawrence W. Reed

Somehow, the fact that more poor people are on welfare,

receiving generous payments, does not seem to have made this

country a nice place to live - not even for the poor on

welfare, whose condition seems not noticeably better than when

they were poor and off welfare. Something appears to have gone

wrong; a liberal and compassionate social policy has bred all

sorts of unanticipated and perverse consequences.

Irving Kristol

The long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization

of the population.

Mark Steyn

The stark truth is that as long as the welfare state makes it

possible for young women - or teenage girls - to have children

without a husband and survive without a job, out-of-wedlock

births will remain high, and the inner city will continue to be

marked by crime, poverty, and despair.

David Boaz

Socialism constitutes a threat to the present and future

welfare of the human race, in the sense that neither socialism

nor any other known substitute for the market order could

sustain the current population of the world.

Friedrich Hacek

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on

the support of Paul.

George Bernard Shaw

The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part

of the family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is

dispensable, his children sense it.

George Guilder

The welfare state has always been judged by its good

intentions, rather than its bad results.

Thomas Sowell

Liberals cling to the idea that critics of welfare are

motivated by greed or callous disregard for the less fortunate.

In fact, during the twenty five years that followed Lyndon

Johnson's declaration of war on poverty, U.S. taxpayers spent

$3 trillion providing every conceivable support for the poor,

the elderly, and the infirm. Private foundations spent scores

of billions more, and private and religious charities even more.

Nevertheless, as Ronald Reagan later quipped, "In the war on

poverty, poverty won".

Mona Charen

Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our

time - more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy,

welfare, or homelessness because it drives everything else.

Charles Murray

There are no dead-end jobs. There are only dead-end people.

Our current social philosophy, and the welfare state

apparatus based on it, are creating more dead-end people.

Thomas Sowell

The welfare state is institutionalized crime - "organized

plunder", as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it.

It systematizes and authorizes what is intrinsically wrong:

forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor

the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually

increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.

Joseph Sobran

Our nation is in deep trouble - morally, economically, and

politically. Practically everything in which the federal

government has embroiled itself for the last several decades is

in crisis - education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,

inflation and the dollar, welfare, government spending, the

drug war, and, of course, foreign policy.

Jacob G. Hornberger

Quotas have done nothing to help the black underclass, or break

the vicious cycles of welfare dependency and drug abuse, unwed

motherhood and crime, fatherless families and dysfunctional

public schools ... Uncle Sam spent trillions of dollars making

a bad situation worse. An avalanche of government welfare

money - no strings attached - paid people not to work or marry,

save or invest, or confront the behavioral causes of their

poverty.

Rod Martin

Coercion is as much a tool of the welfare state as it is of

communism. The programs and edicts of both are backed up by

the police force. All of us know this to be true under

communism, but it is equally true under our own brand of

welfare statism.

Leonard E. Read

Instead of solving economic problems, government welfare

socialism created monstrous moral and spiritual problems - the

kind of problems that are inevitable when individuals turn

responsibility for their lives over to others.

Star Parker

The evidence is thus crystal-clear. Modern welfare destroys.

It does not build competence; it creates dependence ...

Peter Drucker

People can come here, not work and not starve because the

welfare state guarantees that they can live off the rest of us.

Walter Williams

June 2014