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. |
From inside the book
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... develop their faculties ... they valued liberty both as an end and as a means . They believed liberty to be the secret ... developed form is made up of the passionate convictions that human nature is either nonexistent or inherently good ...
... developed that I believe the continued growth of the modernist megastate is the one sure path to eventual poverty in real terms for the vast majority of us , but that is not my primary concern here . If these monstrous state bureaucra ...
... develop the general picture to give them context and , once this big picture was clear , it allowed me to see the problems ... developed is a general model of the dimensions of human life that concern us here . A model tries to show as ...
... develop . Those involve irreducible uncertainties — freedoms — that increase rapidly as we go from the level of general patterns guided by human nature , to cultural patterns , and to any instances of these in concrete situations ...
... develop the argu- ment , but for the most part it must simply be taken for granted that they are very important . I have dealt with them in a great number of earlier works and have tried to keep them constantly in mind here , correcting ...
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 |