Dave Clements
In The Welfare of Nations, the decade-later follow-up to his The Welfare State We’re In, James Bartholomew – former leader writer for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail – takes us on a tour of the world’s welfare states.
It’s fair to say he isn’t a fan. He argues that the
welfare state undermines old values and ‘crowds out’ both our inner
resourcefulness and our sense of duty to one another – including our own
families. Instead of aspiring to be self-reliant, the welfare state makes us
self-absorbed. People aren’t encouraged to exercise responsibility anymore;
instead, they are handed a plethora of ‘rights’. Welfare states ‘have
diminished our civilisation’, Bartholomew concludes.
The welfare state has always been a problematic
entity, from its modern beginnings in the nineteenth century with Bismarck’s
cynical ‘state socialism’– built as much to placate the increasingly
politically active masses as to attend to their welfare – to the vast systems
maintaining millions of economically inactive citizens across the world today.
The welfare state, as its advocates contend, always promises a better society,
with higher levels of equality, but, as Bartholomew counters, it also tends to
foster unemployment, ‘broken families’ and social isolation.....To Read More......
No comments:
Post a Comment