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To have a welfare state stay viable you need to have a burgeoning economy

The Welfare State



When we look at what the term Welfare State means we need to understand that it refers to a state or political entity whereby the state assumes primary responsibility for the welfare of its citizens. To have a welfare state stay viable you need to have a burgeoning economy, without such you set up the forces for disaster economically. Many are under the illusion that globalization will herald the end of the Welfare State with such forces as increased trade, capital mobility and labor market flexibility factored into the increase in equality of living standards in under developed nations and in developed nations.

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Some Western Nation States have been trending towards a reduction in welfare programs, and a shift to an ideology of individualism. Whereas others Such as the United States is trending in the direction of the Welfare State. You can cite the model that France realized when the research showed that 75 per cent of young people openly declare that their dream in life is to become a civil servant, basically an employee of the state with no interest in the private sector, and a reliance on the safe guards that accompanies government work. Some of the net result in this shift left many of the youth of the country unemployed due to the smaller margin of available openings and we seen the car burnings and riots due to the fact that these trends left open the door for employers to hire cheap, disposable labor and to allow youth to remain in a state of limbo while waiting for the civil service positions to open. It also opened the big door wide to create the need for the private sector to find that cheap disposable labor in the form of immigrants; hence we create the great migration model to fill the need. With the great influx of recent migrants we have historically noticed that the reliance on welfare programs increase, fuelling the need to have a Welfare State exists. When we look at Welfare we always equate it with the public sector and what a government provides through taxation and such and paid out to individuals, but that is not the case Welfare comes in many forms and definitions. Recently we have seen corporate welfare emerge into the limelight thus creating the Public Welfare State to coexist with the Personal Welfare State , this is not a new phenomenon , it has occurred throughout history just not on the scale we are witnessing. Three forces are reshaping labor markets around the world:
  1. an oversupply of increasingly mobile workers relative to capital and investment;
  2. Technological innovations that put previously isolated workers in competition with one another; and
  3. increase in productivity that, while beneficial in the long term, contribute to short-term economic instability.
(Sandra Polaski , “Job Anxiety Is Real—and It’s Global,” Policy Brief No. 30, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 2004.) It was once said that the labor market and the manufacturing market can always overcome any obstacles , but the effects of increased and intensified global competition through globalization and the melding of reliance on globalism has threatened disempowerment of labor, particularly organized labor. The effects of this trend in the end is a declining of wages for manufacturing and unskilled workers setting up the forces to become more reliant on governmental subsidies to survive in essence a reset of the standard of living and individual freedom. The steady flow of Illegal Immigration allows a depression in wages in the lower skilled and lower wage industries on an average anywhere from 3 percent to 8 percent. Overall, the global oversupply of labor has decreased median wages in the US by 3.8 percent since 1998. The classic concept of those who work hard to move into a higher class no longer seems to exist when a over reliance on the government to provide exists, people become complacent to seek out those opportunities of employment that the government provides due to the safe guards that civil service provides. According to Martin Bailey of the Institute for International Economics, “There is a social compact in which says each generation will be better off than the last. But it appears to have been broken in the last 10 to 20 years. If you look at the data then it is clear people’s insecurities are not irrational.” Part in parcel to this increase in insecurity is directly related to those who have promoted the concept and application of the New World Order of Globalism both economically and socially. The change in the relations between first and third world countries has resulted in the deindustrialization in advanced industrial societies, increases in income inequality, and pressures on welfare states to transform worker protection and benefits. Over half of all Americans receive government handouts of some sort, worse yet about one in five Americans hold a government job or a government-funded job. Slightly over 52.6 percent of Americans now receive significant income from the government programs, which is up from 49.4 percent in 2000 and far above the percent in 1950 where it was 28.3 percent. A similar percentage receive Social Security or a government pension of some sort or another , about 19 million others get food stamps, 2 million get subsidized housing, and 5 million get education grants and it is predicted that the number of governmental beneficiaries will grow to over 60 percent by 2040. These numbers do not reflect the strains and burdens that migration both legal and illegal pose on the system and the cause and effects of the global concept weighs on the ability for a individual country to sustain the growth of reliance on welfare and governmental subsidies. A dependent nation is a nation that cannot last long hence a desire by some to move forth the agenda of globalization.


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Robert Rohlfing -- Bio and Archives

Robert Rohlfing writes about Liberty and the Preservation of Freedoms.


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