eight reasons the welfare state won’t work

   
 

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Saturday

February 12, 2011

   
 

   
 

eight reasons

why the welfare state

won’t work

   
 

 
 

(1) It breaks the connection between productivity and reward, between laziness and missing out. You really have the right to do that?

(2) It confiscates legally acquired wealth and gives it to those who have done nothing to earn anything.

(3) It centralizes power in its own hands in order to gain momentum for itself: but that’s surely too much power in too few hands.

(4) It slows economic growth.

(5) It creates bad attitude, an entitlement attitude, an attitude looking for a program rather than looking to self-reliance. This attitude is based on fiction, and thus it undermines moral character.

(6) It diminishes a sense of personal liberty, since the government is involved in just about everything – too much is mediated by the impersonal touch of government. I don’t need some government program in my shorts.

(7) It’s an attack on our Constitution and on the meaning of the American founding
in that it goes back to Woodrow Wilson’s book of 1885, Congressional Government, in which he says the Constitution is out of date and inadequate to the task of governing. Are you kidding me? You have the authority and the smarts to rewrite the US Constitution?

(8) The real reason for the welfare state is not altruism anyway, but power-seeking: Politicians compete for your vote by offering you programs, jobs, handouts, etc. It’s all motivated by the desire to erect a patronage system. Goodbye, soul of mine, in other words.
   

 
 

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”

– Federalist 51

 
 

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