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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... earlier works on those , that this work is built firmly on the foundations of the so called " everyday life " perspective . That is , it begins with the raw realities of individuals doing real things in real life , undistorted by ...
... earlier rulers lied in their official histories and statistics , have proclaimed " near revolutions " against the orthodox collectivism of their own parties , and have vowed to soar onward and upward with economic " restructuring " and ...
... earlier works , our " welfare states " are now literally gigantic political machines in which everything , even life itself , is bought and sold for money , votes , and power . In view of this soaring average ignorance quotient and ...
... earlier presidents in these denunciations of " caring " Big Government and in their arguments that it is a matter of life and death for our freedoms and our falter- ing prosperity to " get government off the backs of the people . " The ...
... earlier civilization ; modernist society is made up of welfare states ; therefore , all earlier civilized states were made up of dyswelfare states . One can put this mythical syllogism in various ways , but the crucial point is that the ...
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 |