Welfare State

The term welfare state describes collectively a range of social policies that aim to provide basic services such as health and education, according to need and normally, free of charge through state funding. The theory of the welfare state is the basis of positive liberalism.

It makes laws to control the economy, nationalizes industries, makes laws to protect the weaker sections, arranges the supply of essential commodities, maintains essential services and through progressive taxation and income distribution, tries to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor and thereby, harmonizes the different interests in society.

Positive liberalism in the twentieth century came to be identified with the democratic welfare state. The welfare state involves a radical transformation of the nineteenth century capitalist laissez faire state in respect of the scope of public policy, the character of state action, the basic assumptions concerning human nature and the idea of social good.

Firstly, the recognition that every member of the community, solely because he is a human being, is entitled  to a minimum standard of living.

Secondly, the welfare state is committed to a policy of economic stability and progress, seeking to eliminate the cycles of violent booms and busts in the economy by public policies, whenever private enterprise is unable to prevent by itself the threat of economic instability or decline. Thirdly, the welfare state is committed to full employment as one of the top priorities of public policy.

The economic depression of the 1930s showed not only the economic ravages of unemployment, but also the human degradation inflicted upon those who though able and anxious to work, could not find jobs for no reason over which they had no control.

Through the instrument of welfare, positive liberalism used the power of the state to modify the play of market forces in at least three directions -

  1. By guaranteeing individuals and families a minimum income irrespective to the market value of their work or property.
  2. By narrowing the content of insecurity, by enabling individuals in families to meet certain social contingencies such as sickness, old age and unemployment,
  3. By ensuring that all citizens without distinction of status and class are offered the best available agreed range of social services.

The welfare state does not want to eliminate the market based economy, but to streamline it in a manner where it could realize the productive potentialities by preventing crisis.

As Titmus pointed out, 'it was increasingly regarded as a proper function of government to ward off distress and strain among not only the poor but almost all classes of society.

In Britain, the Beveridge report in 1942 identified five major categories of sufferings; want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. This established the foundation of welfare state. Taken with the Keynesian macroeconomic policies, the idea of welfare become completely associated with social philosophy designed not to replace the market but to correct it.

State welfare was regarded not as an act of charity, but a form of entitlement.

According to Albert Weale, certain material conditions must necessarily hold for individual to carryout wide range of projects. It is not that people make wrong choices but that in the absence of welfare, some peoples choices are arbitrarily narrowed. If liberalism requires the condition of equal autonomy for individuals and markets fail to provide then government action is required to sustain the liberal social order.

It wants to achieve the best practical realization of the demands of liberty, equality and justice.

 

 

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