{"id":17122,"date":"2012-09-28T08:27:47","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T13:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17122"},"modified":"2012-09-28T08:27:47","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T13:27:47","slug":"defending-the-welfare-state-badly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/09\/28\/defending-the-welfare-state-badly\/","title":{"rendered":"Defending the welfare state … badly"},"content":{"rendered":"

At sp!ked<\/em>, David Clements<\/a> reviews a new book by Asbjorn Wahl which inadvertently exposes some of the very real problems of the modern welfare state in the process of praising and defending it:<\/p>\n

Asbjorn Wahl is a trade unionist, director of the Campaign for the Welfare State and Norwegian. While you shouldn\u2019t judge a book by the biog of its author, far less his nationality, it is fair to say that when I opened his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Welfare State<\/em>, I wasn\u2019t expecting much.<\/p>\n

He begins, as all defenders of the welfare state must, with a bleak account of the public; that is, of the welfare state\u2019s helpless, vulnerable clients and potential clients. There is a \u2018feeling of powerlessness and apathy among people\u2019, says Wahl, a feeling of \u2018tragic stories\u2019 too numerous to mention. As well as discovering an \u2018unexpectedly large number… of victims of workfare\u2019, he finds other people suffering \u2018bad health and ever-more demanding work\u2019. He tells us \u2018stories of people who struggle with their health, then their self-confidence and their self-image\u2019. As I heard a man on a picket line tell a Sky News reporter recently, everyone is \u2018sick and tired of being sick and tired\u2019. <\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Wahl is critical of both the anti-democratic tendencies of the European Union and the imposition of the \u2018economic straitjacket\u2019 resulting from the attack on living standards in the Eurozone periphery countries. But his call for the \u2018stimulation of the economy, investment in infrastructure and in productive activities\u2019 can hardly be taken seriously given his doubts about the benefits of economic growth. While attempts by Europe\u2019s governments to counter the financial crisis, and in so doing to create public debt crises, have, as Wahl says, been \u2018exploited as an excuse to make massive, intensified attacks on the welfare state\u2019, this does not in itself invalidate the attack. His view that capitalist excess is responsible for all of Europe\u2019s ills is also his blind spot when it comes to seeing the damage done by an increasingly therapeutic welfarism. In truth, the welfare problem is not something dreamt up by neoliberals (whoever they are). Rather, it is symptomatic of a political culture that robs people of their agency, something that you might expect somebody like Wahl to be opposed to. Far from it. \u2018Good social security\u2019, he says, \u2018gives people that much-needed self-confidence boost that enables them to become active players in society\u2019.<\/p>\n

As this back-to-front and patronising rationale makes clear, today\u2019s welfare state infantilises people. It tells them that they are too damaged to function without its official hand-holding and belittling interventions. Any \u2018progressive\u2019 movement would surely endorse the contrary view that people should be treated as morally independent beings, responsible for their own actions? But to say as much is to invite the charge that you are horribly right wing and endorse \u2018welfare-to-work\u2019 policies (which, incidentally, sound rather more like the unforgiving and austere welfare state envisioned by its founders than that proposed by its supposed critics). <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At sp!ked, David Clements reviews a new book by Asbjorn Wahl which inadvertently exposes some of the very real problems of the modern welfare state in the process of praising and defending it: Asbjorn Wahl is a trade unionist, director of the Campaign for the Welfare State and Norwegian. While you shouldn\u2019t judge a book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,62,84],"tags":[337,95,545,42,519],"class_list":["post-17122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-europe","category-government","tag-eu","tag-jobs","tag-socialsecurity","tag-sociology","tag-stress"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4sa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17123,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17122\/revisions\/17123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}