Criticism of welfare
Empirical methods Prescriptive and policy The modern welfare state has been criticized on economic and moral grounds from all ends of the political spectrum.
According to Belloc, this servile state resembles ancient slavery in its reliance on positive law as opposed to custom or economic necessity by themselves.
Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek mentions Belloc's Servile State favorably in his book The Road to Serfdom.
[2] Along with others such as G. K. Chesterton and Eric Gill, Belloc advocated abolishing profit-making banking in favor of credit unions and replacing capitalism with a system they called distributism which they believed would preserve private property and revive the dignity of work exemplified by the small craftsmen and property holders of the Middle Ages.
Some conservatives in the United Kingdom such as James Batholomew and Theodore Dalrymple claim that the welfare state has produced a generation of dependents who prefer to remain on assistance and make no real effort to find employment, even though assistance is officially only available to those unable to work or who are temporarily unable to find work.
The welfare state in the United Kingdom was created to provide certain people with a basic level of benefits in order to alleviate poverty, but these conservatives believe that it has fostered irresponsible and immature attitudes in many of its recipients.
This means that classical liberals' concern for the rule of law and the curtailing of arbitrary discretion is ignored: bureaucrats are given resources to disburse to their clients.
[7]Conservative and libertarian groups such as The Heritage Foundation[8] and the Cato Institute[9] argue that welfare creates dependence, a disincentive to work and reduces the opportunity of individuals to manage their own lives.
[14][15] Stigma towards welfare recipients has been proven to increase passivity and dependency in poor people and has further solidified their status and feelings of inferiority.
Stigma is a major factor contributing to the duration and breadth of poverty in developed societies which largely affects single mothers.
[19] Marxian socialists argue that modern social democratic welfare policies are unable to solve the fundamental and structural issues of capitalism such as cyclical fluctuations, exploitation and alienation.
[23] Karl Marx famously critiqued the basic institutions of the welfare state in his Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League by warning against the programs advanced by liberal democrats.
While Marx proclaimed that the communists had to support the bourgeoisie wherever it acted as a revolutionary, progressive class because "bourgeois liberties had first to be conquered and then criticised",[24] he specifically argued that measures designed to increase wages, improve working conditions and provide welfare payments would be used to dissuade the working class away from socialism and the revolutionary consciousness he believed was necessary to achieve a socialist economy and would therefore be a threat to genuine structural changes to society by making the conditions of workers in capitalism more tolerable through welfare schemes.
