The Myth of the Welfare State

Jack D. Douglas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351479042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

1

The American Megastate

“The welfare of the people is the supreme law.”

Motto of the Ancient Roman Welfare State

“Anything is good if it serves the people.”

Motto of the National Socialist Workers’ Party

The overriding fact of human life in the twentieth century has been the systemic drift of our great world civilization into gigantic webs of bureaucratic statism and the stagnation and ferocious struggles for power inspired by this drift. All serious analysts agree that our Western economies have been wracked by growing inflation and decreasing investment, productivity, and real-income growth in recent decades. Most fail to realize that these problems of the official, publicly visible economies are vast by comparison with America’s experience in the last century, when economic freedom was still a dominant reality and not a rhetorical shibboleth, as it increasingly is today. In fact, many of them still believe our growing stagnation is produced by our having too many remnants of economic freedom and are anxious to install more centralized planning in the new guise of “industrial policy.”

All serious analysts also recognize that this century has seen an explosion of totalitarianism and warfare more vast than ever before experienced.¹ But they normally see this growth of totalitarian statism and warfare as separate from the more general growth of megastatism and stagnation in our Western democracies.² Nazism, communism, all the other brands of extreme statism and “their” wars are seen as merely accidents, the whims of a few evil men or parties, not the natural extremes of the drift into megastatism that afflicts all of our societies to widely varying degrees and in different cultural forms. They fail almost completely to see that the lust for power is unleashed in all our societies, that all of us have been drifting into megastatist oppression, stagnation, and warfare at different speeds and in various cultural forms. Because of the myths of modernism and rationalism, they have lost touch with the simplest truths about human nature and are blinded to what has been obvious to intelligent observers since the ancient world.

Some analysts have shown in excellent detail that militaristic expansion or imperialism in the very long run erodes a nation’s economy severely, even though it may increase it in the short run. Paul Kennedy has shown this correlation at work in Western states over the last five hundred years,³ but it has been true over the whole five thousand years of “civilized” bureaucratic states. Pitirim Sorokin and the others who have studied the whole history of “civilized” warfare have shown that the correlations are quite complex.⁴ What they have generally failed to see, because they have forgotten or deny the vast importance of both human nature and bureaucracy, is that these are the crucial factors interacting with all the others. When the ever-present lust for power is combined with vast statist bureaucracies, the militarism erodes the economies terribly. The United States was able to expend 10 percent of its gross national product on the military in the 1950s while still expanding economically, though much less than it would have without that burden. Today the expenditure of a mere 7 percent is eroding the economy because our statist bureaucracies exploded in their regulatory powers in the 1960s. The vast powers of huge bureaucracies erode the efficiency of military machines and whole economies, at the same time they attract the most power hungry and then trigger their power hunger into bureaucratic and military expansion.⁵ (Of course, once the people or other elites, or foreign powers, check their power hunger, this process stops, but normally through rebellions, revolutions, civil wars, and foreign defeats.) As Polybius saw over two thousand years ago, great concentrations of statist power eventually trigger ferocious struggles for power at home and imperial wars abroad, regardless of the benevolent slogans and political banners under which the would-be rulers march.⁶

As the ancients also knew from their own awful experience, the great concentrations of statist power generally grow under the banners of the most noble ideals shared at the time. Aristotle concluded from his careful comparative study of the history of states that the most repressive rulers—the tyrants—build their vast new powers deceitfully in the names of freedom, equality, prosperity, justice, and whatever will be popular.⁷ The people will only begin the surrender of their precious freedoms and self-integrity to the rulers of the state to the degree they believe this sacrifice is necessary for their common welfare and only to the degree they trust the analyses and promises of the politician and his supporters. Once they have allowed him to build his infrastructure of tyranny, it is exceedingly difficult to stop the drift into ever greater tyranny. The Athenians were acutely aware of these basic facts of statism because the first famous Greek tyrant, Peisistratus, revealed the basic pattern of successful tyrannization from within which prevails everywhere, with cultural and situational variations. (See ⁸ John Acton summed up this knowledge in his still famous law of power: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”⁹ Our terrifying experience in the twentieth century has confirmed this historical law with tens of millions of human corpses and hundreds of millions of broken lives.

Statist powers can exist for long only when they are seen as necessary for the common welfare—as welfare states—in whatever terms seem most moral and fashionable at the time; and they normally grow slowly, in fits and starts, ups and downs that only later can be seen to be ratchets-up in a great systemic drift into statist bureaucratization. As Michael Rostovtzeff said of the Romans,¹⁰ most of their leaders did not even realize at the time that they were building a huge empire; and certainly, failing to heed Polybius’s warning, they had no idea that by doing so they were marching toward an age of terrible civil wars that would destroy their republic and install the Augustan tyranny disguised as an ideal republic serving the common welfare. They drifted blindly into empire, civil war, and a huge bureaucratic regimentation of life that eventually snuffed out the earlier creativity of the Mediterranean peoples.

Though there have been many vast imperial states in the last five eons, none have been as vast in their scope or as minute in their regimentations of everyday life as our twentieth-century megastates have been. All of the earlier empires were presented by their rulers as welfare states and the vaster ones have produced Caesarism and stagnation, but none before this century—not even the dreaded Assyrians or Mongols—ever produced the colossal regulations of everyday life minutiae now taken for granted, nor the total warfare against defenseless civilian populations which is already the standard operating plan of the gigantic war machines of our superstates. Though many earlier rulers aspired to rule totally, none before our century came near the real totalitarian regulations over all life which have been the goal of our most enflamed modernists. We know of no earlier rulers who even dreamed of building a “new man” through cradle-to-grave statist education, or of redefining the status of human being through court proclamations, but all of this is standard fare in our age of megastatism.

The megastate ratchets up slowly, always in the guise of “serving the common welfare” and generally in the pretense of meeting a crisis.¹¹ Once the bureaucratic regimentation of everyday life has become pervasive, it begins to trigger the very real crises of ferocious domestic and foreign struggles for power, alienation and outrage over the injustices inevitably perpetrated by bureaucrats using their necessarily distorted information about the world (see chapter 9), and economic stagnation and decline (for reasons we shall examine in detail thoughout this book). These crises triggered by the higher levels of statist bureaucratization then become the enabling crises of further ratchets-up in statist powers—it becomes a vital necessity for “the common welfare” to “solve” the problems being caused by the drift into statist collectivization by increasing the bureaucratic regulations, which in turn produce new crises that must be solved by further ratchets-up.

The drift into statist regimentation of life is, thus, an autocatalytic process—it reinforces itself, or feeds upon itself. The drift upward into greater regimentation accelerates because the new statist attempts at solutions to problems destroy the old ways of dealing with them, and build ratchets under the dependencies on the new statist “solutions” as people restructure their life commitments in expectation of continuing those statist dependencies. At the extreme, statist bureaucracies first breed a generalized dependency in individual personalities and then in whole subcultures, whose members transmit this dependency to new generations. Each increase, then, tends to produce a ratchet (which accounts for the obvious downward rigidity). Beyond a critical range (the tipping or take-off in the drift into statist regulation), the acceleration is so great and the ratchet dependencies so generalized that it is extremely rare for the process to be reversed by any means other than civil wars or foreign conquests that destroy the ratchets and produce sudden restructuring.

The drift into the massive regulation of life by statist bureaucracies is partially hidden from its victims by massive self-deceits and by massive political deceits, agitprop, which are purveyed by politicians and, far more importantly, by the intellectuals and publicists who depend for their support on the state (but pretend to be independent and objectively scientific) and by the bureaucracies of mass education. The fits and starts of the upward-drift process (one step backward and two steps foreward, as Lenin put it) confuse even objective and careful observers. The slowness of the drift allows the people to adjust to each step into submission, hardly noticing it and easily excusing it as merely a small encroachment. It also allows those who remember what life was really like before the drift into the “iron cage” of bureaucratic regimentation to die off before the contrast is stark, thereby preventing their effective challenges to the agitprop indoctrination of the young. Our modernist megastates in the democratic nations have grown very slowly over this century and only behind ever-more massive agitprop in support of them by our ever-more massive cadres of intellectual grantsmen, journalists, and bureaucrats of the ministries of official education.

Who now even remembers that a mere seventy-five years ago, one human life span, our Western world had lived for a century, that of the now-stigmatized bourgeois era, in greater peace and harmony than ever before?¹² Who now remembers that the statist powers even in the remaining monarchies were so weak, and the internationalism of our religions and our cultures were so great, that passports were not required for crossing the almost invisible national boundaries? Who now remembers that our nations were not then pervaded by hundreds of thousands of secret agents and counterspies tapping our everyday communications? That “little old ladies” strolled the streets of our great cities at night without fear? That businesses were not mummified in vast reams of millions of laws and untold legal precedents? That the poor fleeing from the corrupt statist bureaucracies around the world were welcomed to our American shores by the tens of millions and rose steadily in wealth and status (so that today the once desperately poor and stigmatized Japanese, Chinese, and Jews have the highest incomes in our nation)?¹³ That real per capita economic growth was many times more rapid than now?¹⁴ That the now-despised gold standard protected all citizens, the richest and the poorest, from statist expropriation by inflation of the centrally planned currency?¹⁵ That the states exercised little power over marriage contracts and no woman could imagine the politicians expropriating her contractual rights by passing no-fault divorce laws and casting her and her children into poverty? That official divorce rates were one-seventh what they are today and family life on average far more certain and happy than in our day, when most marriages end in misery and divorce? That no one could imagine the horrors of superpowers waging “total war,” wantonly firebombing great cities and pushing mankind toward the brink of nuclear annihilation with pacts of Mutual Assured Destruction? That the rich and affluent were inspired by community spirit and altruism, as well as by the natural human vanity, to create worldwide webs of philanthropic organizations on a scale never before seen? And that almost everyone assumed that the excitement and fulfillment of Providential Progress, the secular god of that bygone era of the bourgeoisie, was their natural and inalienable right?

The drift into our megastates has now gone on so long and their police powers are now so omnipresent that most young people assume them to be their inalienable reality. So many generations have now been subjected to an ever-increasing number of years of official education that they now take for granted the exact opposite of all these simple facts and assume that anyone who challenges their ignorance is an ideologist trying to repress their bureaucratically guaranteed statist rights. Most of these miseducated young people assume the ancient regime of our traditional System of Natural Liberty, a term that they have rarely even heard, was an unending “grapes of wrath” for the poor ruled over by evil robber barons who stole from the poor and created thousands of philanthropic institutions only to escape income taxes.¹⁶ Even as they rage against the awful impersonal destructiveness of the bureaucratic juggernauts that stifle their lives, many of them fight desperately to increase the bureaucratic powers, because they assume these powers are necessary to build the welfare state, and, indeed, that all welfare in life must flow from the official forms of the bureaucracies because they are reality. They have no idea that their ignorance puts them firmly in the grip of the core enabling myth of the welfare state and that, consequently, their every twist and turn to escape one bureaucracy by building a more powerful one only compounds their growing misery. Only a tiny fraction of Americans now even remembers that the once-sacred name for opponents of statist powers—liberals—has been transformed by political-historical amnesia and deceit to mean the opposite, those who support the collectivization of all of life. When our own best and brightest young people, who have been “educated” for two decades at the greatest cost per head in the world, have no understanding of the simplest facts about political labels, who can be surprised to find many ignorant peasants around the world seeking salvation and total freedom in the iron tyranny of the totalitarian communist regimes?

The modernist megastates are presented in vastly diverse guises and march under the polychromatic banners of many rationalistic-scientistic myths of legitimacy. Democratic socialism, communism, fascism, nazism, Maoism, Peronismo, shining-pathism, liberalism, democratic welfare statism, Square Dealism, New Dealism, Fair Dealism, Great Societism, and many other brand names have been used and will be invented by the new masters of agitprop, who know in minute and scientific detail how important deceitful political labels are in selling their common product of subservience to the rulers of the state apparatuses.

Certainly there are important differences in the realities of the various nominal brands of statist collectivism, both in their degrees of real (effective) collectivization and in the dimensions of life they collectivize. The cadres of Western intellectuals who now blindly assume or pretend to believe that there i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The American Megastate
• Chapter 2. The Essential Roots of Welfare Statism
• Chapter 3. The Ancient Dawn of Welfare Statism
• Chapter 4. The Drift into the Modernist Megastates
• Chapter 5. The Power of Political Myths
• Chapter 6. The Explosion of Modernist Millennialism
• Chapter 7. Rationalism and Scientism versus Human Nature
• Chapter 8. Central Planning versus Individual Planning
• Chapter 9. The Informational Pathologies Inherent in Bureaucracy
• Chapter 10. "Freedom Works!"
• Appendix I. The Ancient Model of Tyranny
• Appendix II. Theories of the Origins of the Democratic Welfare State
• Appendix III. Theories of the Origins of the Democratic Welfare State
• Appendix IV. Emanationist Rationalism and the Rise of Secular Millennialism
• Index