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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... true believers vary in their emphases on its many dimensions , and the more millennial strains of the myth are normally found only in situations of extremely ambivalent conflict between hope and despair which trigger extreme ...
... true believers were made Social Scientist Central Planners for a day . ) The record also shows that every small ratchet - up leads them to call for bigger ratchets - up . It is this dominant myth of modernism which makes the idea of the ...
... true - believing modernists or for the ignorant , I shall have nothing much to say about poverty , compassion , caring and so on , except as they bear on the crucial issues of statist powers and our freedoms . Like anyone else with com ...
... true , that either society or biology determines what we do . This is most obvious in the iron determinism of Marxism and Social Darwinism , but almost all the general theories of social structure , culture , and so on assumed it in ...
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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 |