Does the welfare state square with the rule of law?

Not much, suggested mid-l9th-century French economist and legislator Frederic Bastiat, quoted in Sheldon Richman's "Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State." Wrote Bastiat, "The (welfare) state is that great fiction in which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else."

Mr. Richman - whose works include "Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax" and articles in The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune and USA Today - is editor of the Foundation for Economic Education's monthly journal "Ideas on Liberty," and a champion of the moral, philosophical and economic case for liberty under law.

Here, Mr. Richman eyes the West's welfare state, a colossus stretching from Japan to Australia, from the European Union to North America, embracing (if that's the word) perhaps a billion people. The embrace goes on despite the collapse of Euro-communism from East Germany to Red Russia in 1989-1991, and it is a warning sign regarding the caprice, politics and rise of the welfare state in a century marked by two World Wars, a Great Depression, a Cold War and the rise of Big Government.

For its part, the welfare state was and is unfazed. Indeed, Prime Minister Tony Blair and then-President Bill Clinton put forth the strategems that the welfare state is but the Third Way, that it is the state at its most benevolent, a collection of "social safety nets." And while "the era of big government is over," in the incongruous words of Mr. Clinton, we shall not return to the days when people "fended for themselves." Or, bye-bye rule of law.

For his part, Mr. Richman sees the welfare state as coercive, unstable, repressive of individual rights, a tyranny of the statist quo. He is one with Nobel economics laureate James Buchanan of George Mason University, who said about the death of Euro-communism and the persistent, insistent, life of the welfare state: "Socialism dies, Leviathan lives." Mr. Richman wonders how Leviathan escaped the graveyard of virtually every form of political and economic collectivism as it itself carries the trappings of collectivism while dampening entire nations in its maw.

Well, Mr. Richman reminds us, this state is not just directed to the poor. If that were the case, it would not have stood the test of time. He notes the middle and upper classes, who pay most of the taxes, would have grown weary of giving without getting. The welfare state also sees to it that the middle class gets freebies like "free" public schooling, low-interest college loans and grants, FHA mortgages with low down payments for home ownership, subsidized day care, medical care, unemployment compensation, workmen's compensation, agricultural aid to farm families, and more.

Mr. Richman sees the welfare state constitutionality getting a free ride from liberal judges on the Supreme Court with lawyers like Cato's Roger Pilon and economists like George Mason's Walter Williams claiming that up to 75 percent of the federal budget or roughly that supporting the welfare state - is unconstitutional. Indeed, Mr. Richman quotes James Madison, recognized architect of the Constitution, to answer those who argue that the presence of the term"general welfare" in the preamble and Article I of the U.S. Constitution gives plenary paternalistic power to the federal government. Said Madison:

"With respect to the words 'general welfare' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character not contemplated by its creators." Mr. Richman notes that the welfare state antedates the New Deal. Its origin reaches back to the last decades of the l9th century when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, supported by Kaiser William II, sponsored national health insurance, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the like, all to head off a rising German Social Democratic Party. The idea spread through Western Europe. It was during the Great Depression that the United States under FDR entered the welfare state era with the Social Security Act of 1935.

Technically both Social Security and Medicare are bankrupt as some 80 million boomers beginning in 2011 latch on; bankrupt in terms of literally tens of trillions of dollars in escalating unfunded liabilities. Mr. Richman holds that scores of rule of law-defying agencies like the Food and Drug Administartion (FDA) could be replaced by private groups like Underwriters Laboratories, that government has nothing to give save what it first takes away, that bad safety nets drive out good safety nets. He concludes that we can take better care of ourselves, untethered. Abolish the welfare state, he says "and watch man soar."

Nothing like a message from Calvin Coolidge, even though he left the White House in 1929. We all know that giving the rich the right to do whatever they want with their loot is far more important than getting the disgusting masses food, housing or education. What these brain-dead oafs don't realize is that the welfare state was extablished in the first place to ward off the danger of socialist revolution. During the Depression the ruling class was in terror of the masses in this country catching on that capitalism as a system was screwing them over, not just individual nasty employers or landlords. Actually, it will be fine to abolish the welfare state someday - and replace it with socialism, in which education at all levels, nutrition, shelter and other necessities will be available to everyone as a right and capitalist parasites are no longer able to plunge people into poverty on a whim.

I enjoyed your revisionist history whereby the appeasement of socialist parasites is the sole concern of capitalists.

In reailty, the smart money knows that without capitalism, the "masses" have almost no chance to advance.

But I'll entertain your whims. Assuming you live in America, why haven't you moved to whichever country has, in your opinion, the best socialist system? Surely there must be one out there...one of the Nordic Track countries, perhaps?

Particularly when it's corporate socialism.

Bailouts

Subsidies

Tax law tailored to avoid the wealth that lives off their dividends.

You just don't like any of it to go to the less than wealthy.

End corporate wealfare.

Particularly when it's corporate socialism.

Bailouts

Subsidies

Tax law tailored to avoid the wealth that lives off their dividends.

You just don't like any of it to go to the less than wealthy.

End corporate wealfare.



Considering how much $$$ goverment wastes I would do everything you've listed here and more, had I enough money to worry about it.

You can't be against corporate welfare but for public welfare or vice versa.

You're either against welfare or you're not.

Be sure to let us all know which socialist paradise you're writing from. Or are you in the US and simply complaining?

If you want to talk about wasting and outright theft of our taxes, look at your military contractors.

If you want to look at efficiency look at the medi care system that only spends a few cents on the dollar for administration while your private health care pockets around 23 cents on the dollar.

There are many other examples. Concerened only toutch the surface.

You love walfare as long as it pads your pocket. If it goes for the poor or young you feel cheated. Nothing new here.

If you want to talk about wasting and outright theft of our taxes, look at your military contractors.

*** Regardless, defense spending is authorized by the Constitution. "General welfare" is an FDR scam and is not.

If you want to look at efficiency look at the medi care system that only spends a few cents on the dollar for administration while your private health care pockets around 23 cents on the dollar.

*** If you think healh care is expensive now, wait until it's "free" under socialism.

You love walfare as long as it pads your pocket. If it goes for the poor or young you feel cheated. Nothing new here.

*** it's odd how liberals think punishing the successful and rewarding the fully-capable-of-working poor with handouts is "justice."

*** we could feel just as good about paying half the amount of taxes we do now.

Since the GAO ( you know, congress) has found that Trillions are

unaccounted for. 800 Billion missing in one year from their last attempt at finding where it all went. That's more than their annual budget. Maybe you got some of that cut huh? You need some government cheese with your whine.

Since the GAO ( you know, congress) has found that Trillions are

unaccounted for. 800 Billion missing in one year from their last attempt at finding where it all went. That's more than their annual budget.

----I"m as outraged as you are that Americans don't demand honest government. For the few people who even know what it is, the General Accounting Office has very little power, and they must be "asked" to investigate potential mismanagement.

---Both parties enjoy the near-zero accountability of the budget. It is a perpertual crime against taxpayers but people, being what they are, would rather take their chances in a "fixed" lobbying game of wealth distribution if they think the house might favor them.