Quotes About Welfare

The social question is back on the agenda.

Under Khrushchev, Stalin-era laws restricting job mobility were abandoned, the official workday was shortened, minimum wages were established and a system of maternity leave introduced, along with a national pension scheme (extended to collective farmers after 1965). In short, the Soviet Union—and its more advanced satellite states—became embryonic welfare states, at least in form.

Men like Hayek or von Mises seemed doomed to professional and cultural marginality. Only when the welfare states whose failure they had so sedulously predicted began to run into difficulties did they once again find an audience for their views:

The welfare states of continental Europe—what the French call the Etat providence, or providential state—followed yet a third model. Here, the emphasis was primarily on protecting the employed citizen against the ravages of the market economy. It should be noted that 'employed' here is no casual adjective. In France, Italy and West Germany it was the maintenance of jobs and incomes in the face of economic misfortune that preoccupied the welfare state.

It is not by chance that social democracy and welfare states have worked best in small, homogeneous countries, where issues of mistrust and mutual suspicion do not arise so acutely. A willingness to pay for other people's services and benefits rests upon the understanding that they in turn will do likewise for you and your children: because they are like you and see the world as you do.

But each in its own way was affected by the growing intolerance of immoderate inequality, initiating public provision to compensate for private inadequacy.

More than anything else, the welfare states of the mid-20th century established the profound indecency of defining civic status as a function of economic good fortune.

Beneficiaries of the welfare states whose institutions they call into question, they are all Thatcher's children: politicians who have overseen a retreat from the ambitions of their predecessors.

place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of 'blacks', 'students', 'women' and, a little later, homosexuals. Since none of these constituents, at home or abroad, was separately represented in the institutions of welfare societies, the new Left presented itself quite consciously as opposing not merely the injustices of the capitalist order but above all the 'repressive tolerance' of its most advanced forms: precisely

Moreover, a social service provided by a private company does not present itself as a collective good to which all citizens have a right.

The more equal a society, the greater the trust. And it is not just a question of income: where people have similar lives and similar prospects, it is likely that what we might call their 'moral outlook' is also shared.

By the early '70s it would have appeared unthinkable to contemplate unraveling the social services, welfare provisions, state-funded cultural and educational resources and much else that people had come to take for granted.

In short, economic prosperity required trade, but political stability required welfare states.

To me, socialism was just common sense.

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. —GANDHI

Fr., I want there to be no peasant in my realm so poor that he will not have a chicken in his pot every Sunday.

I love animals and feel very strongly that people should not be allowed to buy a pet if they are not able to look after it.

Oprah had no sympathy for welfare recipients and frequently berated them. 'I was a welfare daughter, just like you….How did you let yourselves become welfare mothers? Why did you choose this? I didn't.

she worked and prayed for the welfare of humans for over ten million years. Then she was transformed into a goddess whose only desire was to ease the world's pain.

I'm stretching my point only a bit when I say that in American life, every vision must begin and end in an economic argument in order to be heard, on urgent matters of human life: labor, education, immigration, refugees, prisons, poverty, health care. Rename

Ronald Reagan breezily shared anecdotes about how Lyndon Johnson's Great Society handed over hard-earned taxpayer dollars to a "slum dweller" to live in posh government-subsidized housing and provided food stamps for one "strapping young buck" to buy steak, while another used the change he received from purchasing an orange to pay for a bottle of vodka. He ridiculed Medicaid recipients as "a faceless mass, waiting for handouts." The

If manipulation really does increase welfare, then it would seem to be justified and even mandatory on ethical grounds.

A new generation of avaricious and egocentric Americans, in the thrall of anti-industrial ideologies, shuns the productive adventures of creation to pursue the comfort and security of the welfare state, abetted by the discount windows at the Federal Reserve, guarantees for "green jobs" and solar enterprises, the triple-A assurances of Fannie and Freddie, and the bonanzas with which we reward litigation against the productive.

A generous basic state pension is the least a civilized society should offer those who have worked hard and saved through their whole lives.