| Abstract: | ABSTRACT: The crisis of the welfare state continues to be associated with the ‘hypertrophic‘ growth of social expenditure in public sector budgets and with the fiscal crisis of the state. This approach is refuted in this paper and preference is given to an explanation of the problems of the welfare state which attributes them to a complex set of (interrelated) causes, among which the most salient are: the crisis of principles and objectives; the inability to combine social principles and objectives with those of the market; and the limits of a system which, although capable of enormous ‘churning‘, only succeeds in producing, in most circumstances, zero-sum games. In order to corroborate these theses, a number of reflections are developed on six themes which can be regarded as illustrative of the main ailments afflicting current social policy systems in industrialized countries. If every individual were reared in conditions as favourable to health as science can make them, received an equally thorough and stimulating education up to sixteen, and knew on reaching manhood that, given a reasonable measure of hard work and good fortune, he and his family could face the risks of life without being crushed by them, the most shocking of existing inequalities would be on the way to disappear. Sharp contrasts of pecuniary income might indeed remain, as long as society were too imperfectly civilized to put an end to them. But the range of life corrupted by their influence would be narrower than today. It would cease to be the rule for the rich to be rewarded, not only with riches, but with a preferential share of health and life, and for the penalty of the poor to be not merely poverty, but ignorance, sickness and premature death (K.H. Tawney) 1. |
