I have been reading in George's posts that he has a lot of critizism against the welfare state, only based on prejudice, and no facts to back up his claims, so here I have some facts to prove how wrong Georges are.
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Welfare states
There are three main interpretations of the idea of a "welfare state".
In the first, a
welfare state is an ideal model in which the government assumes the primary responsibility for the individual and social welfare of its citizens.
Secondly, the term is used for the provision of welfare services by the state.
Third, welfare states may be identified with general systems of social protection.
In many "welfare states" welfare is not provided by the state at all, but by a combination of independent, voluntary and government services.
Critics of the welfare state in the US claim it makes citizens lazy and less inclined to work. This is unsupported by the economic evidence; there is no association between economic performance and welfare expenditure in developed countries. (See A B Atkinson, Incomes and the Welfare State, Cambridge University Press 1995.)
The Welfare State idea is also criticized as not much bang for the buck, however others point to counterexamples that may suggest otherwise. R Goodin et al, The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2000) show that on major economic and social indicators, the USA performs worse than the Netherlands, which has a high commitment to welfare provision.
The Welfare State is accused of resulting in high taxes in places like Denmark (Tax level of 50.4% of the GNP in 2002) and Sweden (Tax level of 50.3% of the GNP in 2002). Some do, but these countries also have high wage economies and high GNPs; high taxes do not imply poor economic performance.
Critics of the welfare state also argue that these government services are in fact inefficient and thus expensive, by contrast with nations with less welfare like the USA. In fact, the US system is substantially more expensive, especially in health care, because of its organisational diversity and heavy administrative costs. National systems like the UK National Health Service are proportionately cheaper, and have better coverage, than market-based systems.
The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) produces international statistics on health care -
http://www.oecd.org
(The text on the web site is available on both English and French. Check the upper right corner.)
Examples of welfare states:
- United Kingdom: the Welfare State
- Germany: the Social Market
- France: Solidarity and insertion
- Sweden: the Institutional-Redistributive model
- Finland: social democratic welfare
- Australia
- Norway