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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... welfare state " was rarely used to refer to the American megastate , probably because its historical association with British socialism still offended too many Americans ... welfare of the citizens . But this 6 Myth of the Welfare State.
... welfare of the whole state . The use of the term welfare state implicitly assumes that the traditional— ancient or premodernist — governments in our Western nations were in fact dyswelfare states that brought misery to the people or ...
... welfare statists , just as all our sane republi- can leaders were welfare federationists . All mentally competent children understand the same iron rule of threats - and - inveiglements that rulers use to govern states , and the ...
... welfare - statism as merely a compromise , a halfway house or Purgatory , one small step on the long journey to the New Heaven on Earth . ( Anyone who doubts this need only consider how greatly our society would be transformed if these ...
... welfare statists by purposefully identifying their reign with the realm of Camelot and singing of the Second Coming while mourning the murder of the Hero . ) And in the United States the modernist welfare state has also had to be ...
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 |