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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... forms of erstwhile " crime , " such as drugs and abortion , and totally " pro- police power " for some new forms of " economic crime . " ( In appendix I , I have tried to present the clearest possible American meanings of the political ...
... forms of Big Government are inherently evil — that they are repressive by their very nature and are , therefore , the most awful form of dyswelfare state , in mod- ernist terms . With the partial exception of Theodore Roosevelt , all ...
... forms of corrup- tion by which relatively rich unions " milk " consumers and force the poor out of the work force so they cannot compete with them . Unionized big businesses also commonly support both to increase the costs of their ...
... form . The failures of all such positivistic and structuralistic theories , as they are called within the disciplines of social ... forms of human action . It is very clear , for example , that protracted ( decades long ) bureaucratic ...
... form still used uncritically by almost all journal- ists , politicians , and bureaucrats and by many would - be ... forms of official statistical data from which the hypothesizers can pick and choose . The result is that the theory ...
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 |