Top 100 Quotes About Welfare State
#1. The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.
Thomas Sowell
#2. In various European countries, it is increasingly common for young men to live with their parents into their 30s and even longer. Why not? In the welfare state, there is no shame in doing so.
Dennis Prager
#3. The welfare state is collapsing all around us. There are people that realize that we can't go on this way, but I'm not sure how many people realize how close we are to the collapse of the U.S. financial system.
Rush Limbaugh
#4. We must recognize that personal freedoms diminish as the welfare state grows. The price of more and more public programs is less and less private freedom.
Caspar Weinberger
#5. Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.
Niall Ferguson
#6. The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.
Thomas Sowell
#7. A well-designed welfare state can actually encourage people to take chances with their jobs and be more, not less, open to changes.
Ha-Joon Chang
#8. Still, there is space for this secular movement that has become frustrated with the liberal experience. In my opinion, there is a need for an effort that helps he establishment of social justice while taking into consideration all the qualifications and reservations against the welfare state.
Samir Kassir
#9. Libertarians know that a free country has nothing to fear from anyone coming in or going out - while a welfare state is scared to death of poor people coming in and rich people getting out.
Harry Browne
#10. And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse - the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a sociopolitical monster called the welfare state to exist.
Barry Goldwater
#11. An indictment of entitlements has to focus on the huge 'social wealth' that the welfare state creates at the stroke of the pen. Yet statistical tests of the effects of welfare spending on employment yield erratic results.
Edmund Phelps
#12. The welfare state may be well-intentioned, but it is a Ponzi scheme
Dennis Prager
#13. American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically larger public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does.
Robert Kuttner
#14. To have created a Welfare State was a great achievement; but we must go on to create a Welfare Planet.
George Mikes
#15. Our expensive welfare state is fueled by the destructive notion that 'greed' is when you want to keep your own money but 'compassion' is when you want to take somebody else's.
Lawrence Reed
#16. Bush has legitimized a huge expansion of the welfare state, liberalizing immigration, and using force for democratization abroad. All the next Democratic president has to do to finish Bush's hard work is to raise taxes to pay for it all.
Andrew Sullivan
#17. The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism.
Ludwig Von Mises
#18. The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne'er-do-wells. It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world's biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine.
Martin Durkin
#19. There's no conflict between the social-welfare state and open markets.
Gerhard Schroder
#20. The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
Thomas Sowell
#21. The welfare state is the bankruptcy law for workers
Ha-Joon Chang
#22. You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.
Milton Friedman
#23. Gradually, he didn't doubt, the world would calm down into a gigantic welfare state devoted to sporting, cultural and sexual exchange, with the accepted international currency being items of hifi equipment.
Julian Barnes
#24. Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.
Thomas Sowell
#25. The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.
George Will
#27. Socialism is the gradual and less violent form of communism, and socialist is the project of the European Union, which was born in Maastricht in 1992. The intent was to save socialism in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the predictable bankruptcy of the welfare state in the West as well.
Vladimir Bukovsky
#28. Compassion is good but politicians have turned compassion into the welfare state.
Thomas Sowell
#29. Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.
Gregory Benford
#30. This, by the way, is the welfare state in action: Its a whole bunch of special interest groups screwing consumers and taxpayers, and making them think they're really benefiting.
Murray Rothbard
#31. In the 1880s, people all over the world looked to America for inspiration. Its very existence was proof that it was possible to have a relatively free and peaceful country. No income tax, no foreign wars, no welfare state, no intrusions on civil liberties.
Harry Browne
#32. Healthcare is the cornerstone of the socialist state. It is the crown jewel of the welfare state.
Monica Crowley
#33. There are people who believe in expanding the welfare state across the spectrum of races and ethnicities and creeds.
Jeb Bush
#34. Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it
Stephen Harper
#35. There are jobs that American citizens will not do. We can talk about why that is. We can talk about how our welfare state is broken, how we encourage people not to work, but that doesn't help the farmer pick his peaches this summer.
Mick Mulvaney
#36. The Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility.
Joe Orton
#37. As long as there's this welfare state of ours we're not going to have any good fighters
Tommy Farr
#38. [There] are people who make a complete and utter mockery of 'democracy' and 'equality' - they're the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them alive. That's all.
Michael Palin
#39. Bahrainis are better off than many other Arabs. We have a welfare state, everybody gets a salary whether they have a job or not. Electricity and food are subsidized; school and healthcare are free. And we don't differentiate between Bahrainis and foreigners. We are very proud of that.
Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa
#40. To continue on the road we Americans have traveled for the past century is ultimately to deliver ourselves completely into the hands of an unlimited government. We can have a free society or a welfare state. We cannot have both.
Robert Higgs
#41. The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.
Ayn Rand
#42. History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past ... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.
Alan Bullock
#43. A welfare state is frightened of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out.
Harry Browne
#44. Throughout history, politicians have used other people's property to buy themselves power. That is the primary achievement of the welfare state.
James Bovard
#45. I want to increase our spending on research and development by 25%. That's something the U.S. does very well. That dynamism alongside a welfare state in the European community - that's the synthesis I want to achieve.
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero
#46. Under both the welfare state and communism, the responsibility for the welfare, security, and prosperity of the people is presumed to rest with the central government.
Leonard Read
#47. The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state.
George Gilder
#48. If we conservatives "of color" refuse to promote the welfare state, unfettered abortion, affirmative action, and massive immigration, we are guilty of "selling out.
Michelle Malkin
#49. The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states.
Cornel West
#50. The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that's not equity, it's just creating a society where you can't ask anything of people.
Jacques Delors
#51. If we could tax Americans' cognitive dissonance we could balance the budget. The American people want all kinds of incompatible things, they're human beings, and they want high services, low taxes, and an omnipresent, omniprominent welfare state.
George F. Will
#52. The Welfare State, which begun in Imperial Germany for the truly indigent and disabled, has now become "everybody's entitlement" and an increasing burden on those who produce.
Peter Drucker
#53. The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.
Thomas Sowell
#54. the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state. The
Marc Reisner
#55. The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
Thomas Sowell
#56. The stark truth is that as long as the welfare state makes it possible for young women - or teenage girls - to have children without a husband and survive without a job, out-of-wedlock births will remain ruinously high, and the inner city will continue to be marked by crime, poverty, and despair.
David Boaz
#57. Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the Left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people.
Dennis Prager
#58. The welfare state creates its own victim/client constituency. By making individuals free and independent, we reduce the need for 'charity' to those truly needy citizens what we can certainly afford to help through real charity.
Grover Norquist
#59. Charities should not become the junior partner in the welfare state; whether or not they provide services funded by Government or, indeed, receive grants from Government, they must remain independent and focused on their mission.
William Shawcross
#60. Such terms as communism, socialism, Fabianism, the welfare state, Nazism, fascism, state interventionism, egalitarianism, the planned economy, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier are simply different labels for much the same thing.
Leonard Read
#61. Democrats are firm believers in the welfare state for their own constituents, whether that's a crack addict mother of five or a Wall Street banker.
Ann Coulter
#62. Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today's Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety.
Tony Judt
#63. There was no welfare state, and people had to rely mainly on the Poor Law - that was all the state provided. It was very degrading, very humiliating. And there was a means test for receiving poor relief.
Barbara Castle
#64. Thatcher had broken the miners' union, all but crushed the Labour Party, dramatically cut back the welfare state, even flirted with a poll tax. In the circles I ran in, Reagan was mocked as a childish dolt. Thatcher was despised.
Jon Weisman
#65. The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
Thomas Sowell
#66. The welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.
Thomas Sowell
#67. There are no dead-end jobs. There are no dead-end jobs. There are only dead-end people. Our current social philosophy, and the welfare state apparatus based on it, are creating more dead-end people.
Thomas Sowell
#68. Our upside down welfare state is socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor.
William O. Douglas
#69. A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.
Irving Kristol
#70. The welfare state is an assault on families.
Larry Elder
#71. The future of Norway isn't about competing on being the cheapest but the most innovative. We have an expensive welfare state, and the only answer to continue that way is to become more competitive, especially on knowledge.
Erna Solberg
#72. What we're putting forward is the most radical reform of the welfare state ... for 60 years. I think it will have a transformative effect in making sure that everyone is better off in work and better off working rather than on benefits.
David Cameron
#73. Free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.
Noam Chomsky
#74. I believe that the Welfare State redistributes poverty and reduces income. As Karl Kraus once said of psychoanalysis, the Welfare State is the disease which it purports to cure.
Arnold Kling
#75. I'm not going to be known as the Sinn Fein Minister who did the bidding of a Tory administration which is focused on decimating the welfare state.
Martin McGuinness
#76. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?
C.S. Lewis
#77. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults
Dennis Prager
#78. The welfare state is an enemy of private property. The excessive taxation used to support the welfare state is extremely dangerous.
Charles A. Murray
#79. As a result of the Left's sympathetic views of pacifism and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world's evil, and even to defend them
Dennis Prager
#80. When the government intervenes to help, whether in the European welfare state or in America's more diluted version, it not only diminishes our responsibility for the desired outcome, it enfeebles the institutions through which people live satisfying lives.
Charles Murray
#81. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality. And the rhetoric of liberalism - labeling each new entitlement a 'right reinforces this sense of entitlement.' -
Dennis Prager
#82. The British welfare state, it seemed, had removed the incentives without which a capitalist economy simply could not function: the carrot of serious money for those who strove, the stick of hardship for those who slacked.
Niall Ferguson
#83. Coercion is as much the tool of the welfare state as it is of communism. The programs and edicts of both are backed by the police force. All of us know this to be true under communism, but it is equally true under our own brand of welfare statism.
Leonard Read
#84. All branches of our government today are controlled by individuals who use their power to undermine liberty and enhance the welfare/warfare state-and frequently their own wealth and power,
Ron Paul
#85. The Convention probably foresaw what it has been a principal aim of these papers to inculcate that the danger which most threatens our political welfare is, that the state governments will finally sap the foundations of the Union.
Alexander Hamilton
#86. The United States are a political state, or organized society, whose end is government, for the security, welfare, and happiness of all who live under its protection.
William H. Seward
#87. Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare - something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state - something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#88. No society is healthy which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.
Richard M. Weaver
#89. There are those that want freedom from individual responsibility, and then there are those that want individual liberty. "Freedom" and "liberty" no longer mean what they used to. A desire for dependence has been made fashionably desirable.
A.E. Samaan
#90. "Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem to characterize our age. If we desire sincerely and passionately the safety, the welfare and the free development of the talents of all men, we shall not be in want of the means to approach such a state."
Albert Einstein
#91. P4- no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness off welfare institutions once the professional hierarchies off these have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary.
Ivan Illich
#92. Using coercion to drive charity is like using kidnapping to create love.
Stefan Molyneux
#93. In the present State of America, our welfare and prosperity depend upon the cultivation of our lands and turning the produce of them to the best advantage.
George Washington
#94. I think doctors care very deeply about their patients, but when they organize into the AMA, their responsibility is to the welfare of doctors, and quite often, these lobbying groups are the only ones that are heard in the state capitols and in the capitol of our country.
Jimmy Carter
#95. The secret teaching was the bodhisattva ideal, to live for others, for the welfare of all beings. That's enlightenment, not some flashy state of luminosity.
Frederick Lenz
#96. I am a very instinctive Conservative. I have created a welfare system where it pays to work. I have created independent schools within the state sector bringing excellence to children wherever they are.
David Cameron
#97. Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.
Mark Steyn
#98. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself.
C. G. Jung
#99. We are living in a highly organized state of socialism. The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state. His property is only his as the state does not need it. He must hold his life and his possessions at the call of the state.
Bernard Baruch
#100. The natural tendency of the state is inflation. This statement will shock those accustomed to viewing the state as a committee of the whole nation ardently dispensing the general welfare, but I think it nonetheless true.
Murray Rothbard
