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
Results 1-5 of 90
... vast unpredictability and changability of political rhet- oric in our world of mass - mediated politics . They are examples above all of the immense self - deceptions suffered today , of the omnipresent deceits per- petrated by rulers ...
... vast realms of their bureaucracies wisely planning the lives of us all . These pretensions and deceits are eventually unmasked but are always replaced by similar Machiavellian contrivances , so they succeed in fooling most of the voters ...
... vast majority of us , but that is not my primary concern here . If these monstrous state bureaucra- cies continue to grow over the next century at the pace they have grown over the past century , the poverty of the great mass of people ...
... vast amounts of data then makes it nearly impossible even for those who construct it to know the details of the particulars sufficiently to see the problems in the information . When this official statistical information is then used to ...
... vast pluralism of media messages and treat it as the whole , just as the more totalitarian theo- rists have seized upon the values most common in our media and asserted they prove the media are part of the bourgeois conspiracy . Our ...
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 |