The Myth of the Welfare StateTransaction Publishers, 1989 M01 1 - 505 pages The Myth of the Welfare Stale is a basic and sweeping explanation of the rise and fall of great powers, and of the profound impacts of these megastates on ordinary lives. Its central theme is the rise of bureaucratic collectivization in American society. It is Douglas's conviction, which he supports with a wealth of detail, that statist bureaucracies produce siagnation, often exacerbated by inflation, which in turn produces the waning of state power. Douglas has his own set of "isms" that require concerted attention: mass mediated rationalism, scientism, technologism, credentialism, and expertism. People who make policies have little, if any, awareness of the actual way social processes evolve: agricultural policy is set by people who know little of farming, arid manufacturing policy is set by people who have never set foot on a factory floor. In light of this "soaring average ignorance," it is little wonder that policy-making has Alice-in-Wonderland characteristics and effects. Douglas sees the notion of a welfare state as a contradiction in terms; its widespread insinuation into the culture is made possible by its weak mythological form and benign-sounding characteristics. In fact, welfare states in whatever form they appear have failed in their purpose: to redistribute income or increase real wealth. The megastates are the source of social instability and economic downturn. They grow like a tidal drift. They start out to correct the historical grievances of the laissez-faire states, only to increase the problems they seek to correct. In this, the welfare state is a weakened form of the totalitarian state, producing similarly unhappy results. Professor Douglas has produced a work of "anti-policy" - arguing that freedom leavened by an ordinary sense of self-interest and social concern can overcome the shortfalls of the megastates and their myth-making, self-serving, propensities. |
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... cultural gaps between commonsense wisdom , the other social sciences , and the humanities better than any of the other professions . Though the " sociological imagina- tion " has been starved and greatly distorted in recent decades by ...
... Cultural Revolution that were intended to cata- pult them into Mao's ninth heaven of millennial bliss , but had cast them instead into mass starvation and civil war . The Soviets were still mired in the Brezhnev era's smug conviction ...
... than computerized econometric models make our politicians , but everyone shared the same basic cultural experience of peasant life and it was undoubtedly hard to mislead a small nation of several million 4 Myth of the Welfare State.
... good and inherently extremely plastic , hence overwhelmingly determined by cultural conditioning ; that the earliest human beings were noble savages who hunted and gathered in the pristine ( 8 Myth of the Welfare State.
... cultural deter- minists act in accord with this common sense most of the time . ) The grand theorists of man and biology asserted that the opposite is true , that either society or biology determines what we do . This is most obvious in ...
Contents
1 | |
The American Megastate | 21 |
The Essential Roots of Welfare Statism | 49 |
The Ancient Dawn of Welfare Statism | 101 |
The Drift into the Modernist Megastates | 141 |
The Power of Political Myths | 211 |
The Explosion of Modernist Millennialism | 243 |
Rationalism and Scientism versus Human Nature | 295 |
Central Planning versus Individual Planning | 337 |