Welfare State Quotes - Page 3

• The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.

  Thomas Sowell

  Loss, Income, Benefits

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• The welfare state that is built upon this conception seems to prove precisely away from the conservative conception of authoritative and personal government, towards a labyrinthine privilege sodden structure of anonymous power, structuring a citizenship that is increasingly reluctant to answer for itself, increasingly parasitic on the dispensations of a bureaucracy towards which it can feel no gratitude.

  Roger Scruton

  Gratitude, Government, Apathy

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• The welfare state is an enemy of private property. The excessive taxation used to support the welfare state is extremely dangerous.

  Charles A. Murray

  Support, Enemy, Taxation

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• The Welfare State, which begun in Imperial Germany for the truly indigent and disabled, has now become "everybody's entitlement" and an increasing burden on those who produce.

  Peter Drucker

  Germany, Welfare, Entitlement

  Peter Drucker (2014). “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, p.269, Routledge

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• Quite the most Christian thing that has happened in my lifetime is the Welfare State.

  Donald Soper, Baron Soper

  Christian, Welfare, Lifetime

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• The welfare state has done to Black Americans what slavery (and Jim Crow and racism) could not have done. . .break up the black family. Today, just slightly over 30 percent of black kids live in two-parent families. Historically, from the 1870s on. . . 75-90 percent of black kids lived in two-parent families.

  John Stossel

  Kids, Two, Racism

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• The welfare state is institutionalized crime - 'organized plunder,' as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it. It systematizes what is intrinsically wrong: forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.

  Joseph Sobran

  People, Support, Expansion

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• In my youth, I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Country, Government, Different

  Benjamin Franklin (2008). “The Autobiography and Other Writings”, p.298, Bantam Classics

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• Young people today are being robbed. Of their rights.  Of their freedom.  Of their dignity.  Of their futures.  The culprits?  My generation and our predecessors, who either created or failed to stop the world straddling engine of theft, degradation, manipulation, and social control we call the welfare state.

  Tom G. Palmer

  Rights, People, Today

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• The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.

  Ayn Rand

  Differences, Liberty, Matter

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• Socialists do not merely want a welfare state, they absolutely must have one. They must have a grovelling dependent class from which to obtain their daily opiate: an hallucinogenic euphoria which comes from the delusion of being superior to and more altruistic than all others. They must have 'the poor, huddled masses' in much the same manner as vampires must have the blood of their victims.

  Edward Britton

  Blood, Class, Vampire

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• The welfare state destroys the market mechanisms - lessens free choice and willing exchange. Simultaneously creating unnatural specializations, it must, granted statism's premise, resort to welfarism; that is, it must assume the responsibility for the people's welfare: their employment, their old age, their income, and the like. As this is done, man loses his wholeness; he is dispossessed of responsibility for self, the very essence of his manhood. The more dependent he becomes, the less dependable!

  Leonard Read

  Responsibility, Men, Essence

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• There are three ways in which a man becomes a slave. He may be born into slavery, or forced into it, or he can deliberately accept his servitude. All three forms flourish in the modern world. Men are born and forced into slavery in Russia and her satellites states. Men in the free world invite slavery when they ask the government to provide complete security, when they surrender their freedom to the "Welfare State."

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Wisdom, Men, Russia

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• The usage of the words "public" and "public sphere" betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam. Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment.

  Jurgen Habermas

  Confused, Historical, Employment

  "Space, Place, and Environmental Ethics". Book by Andrew Light, 1997.

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• Today's citizen is obliged to find his freedom only in the narrow ruts pre-approved by his bureaucratic overlords. "Risk-free liberty" is the ideal of the Welfare State: citizens are permitted only liberties which have been declawed, defanged, neutered, certified and wrapped in benevolent restrictions.

  James Bovard

  Risk, Liberty, Today

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• You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it is still the truth that had to said in the age of the Welfare State.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, Effort, Arrogance

  Ludvig von Mises' letter to Ayn Rand praising Atlas Shrugged (January 23, 1958) as quoted in Jorg Guido Hulsmann "Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism", September 4, 2007.

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• The Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility.

  Joe Orton

  Oscars, Welfare, Wilde

  Joe Orton (1998). “The Visitors: Fred and Madge : Two Plays”, p.13, Grove Press

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• There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, Powerful, Political

  Noam Chomsky (1988). “The Culture of Terrorism”, p.29, South End Press

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• [There] are people who make a complete and utter mockery of 'democracy' and 'equality' - they're the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them alive. That's all.

  Michael Palin

  Running, People, Competition

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• In the 1880s, people all over the world looked to America for inspiration. Its very existence was proof that it was possible to have a relatively free and peaceful country. No income tax, no foreign wars, no welfare state, no intrusions on civil liberties.

  Harry Browne

  Country, War, Inspiration

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• Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promises a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.

  Milton Friedman

  Jobs, Impossible Things, Promise

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• Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began. ... What if the checks had never arrived? No doubt the blacks would have fully privatized the welfare state through continued looting. But they were paid off and the violence subsided.

  Ron Paul

  Order, What If, Doubt

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• The ‘Great Society’ has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…they don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.

  Michele Bachmann

  Retirement, Different, Looks

  "CBS News/NJ debate transcript". National Journal debate on foreign policy and national security, www.cbsnews.com. November 13, 2011.

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• Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.

  George Packer

  War, Party, Independent

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• Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the Left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people.

  Dennis Prager

  Selfish, Media, People

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