I had always considered the welfare state to be a socialist construct designed to provide for the many through the means of redistributing the earnings of the few. After all, socialists want nothing more than a uniform, unthinking herd of worker drones to provide the money to further the leftist ideal.

That was before I read Bill Buckler, writing at ZeroHedge, where he gives a rather different view in that the welfare state is akin to a bribe to allow governments (of whatever flavour) the means to extract more and more from their subjects :

In all so-called “developed” nations, the welfare state is the mechanism which makes government depredations acceptable to the public. To establish and enhance the power of government, an ever larger portion of wages and salaries are sequestered through taxation and an avalanche of rules and regulations are enforced via government fees and charges. Some “compensation” must be found to make this bitter financial medicine go down without becoming dangerously unpalatable. This is where the welfare state comes in. The only way to ease a situation in which it is difficult, to the verge of being impossible, for an individual to take care of him or herself is to create a situation where the State takes over the role. Or at least the State promises to take over the role, should it become “necessary”.

This mechanism can “work” – for a while – but the result is that there are more people dependent on the State than there are people who are able to create the wealth on which the State depends. This situation is inherent in all welfare states, approaching in most of them, and already here in one. That state is Japan.

Japan seems to be the worlds test bed for how long the current welfare system will last (more details here in a previous post) and at their current rate it will not be very many years before it is completely buggered :

In Japan today, 23 percent of the population is over the age of 65. Forty years from now in 2050, given present Japanese birthrates, that will have blown out to 40 percent. At present, the ratio of retirees to working-age Japanese is 35.5 percent. In ten years that ratio will be 48 percent and in forty years (again given present Japanese birthrates), it will have blown out to the literally impossible ratio of 76.4 percent.

Saving the worst for last, today, more than half (56 percent) of Japanese workers rely on financial support from their parents or other sources to cover their living expenses. These are the same people who will, in future, be expected to perpetuate the ever more bloated Japanese welfare state. This stark and obvious impossibility is the current situation in Japan. It will soon be the situation right across the developed world. The “solution” will be a rapidly increasing sell-off of rapidly diminishing “assets”. Most of these assets will be paper claims to wealth which does not exist and never did.

The current nibbling at the edges of the problem with things like easing up the retirement age by a few years will not cut it in the long run.

The welfare state needs drastic surgery to reduce its cost and consequently scale back its levels of provision but if governments actually do that what bribe is then left to sweeten the increasing burden of the state on the worker?