The origins of welfare state capitalism

[Cypress]

The intellectual foundations of welfare state capitalism: Christianity, liberalism, and socialism.

Perhaps the most important transformation of capitalism in the mid-20th century was the development of welfare-state capitalism.

A. The welfare state had diverse intellectual origins, and it took a variety of forms in various national contexts.
B. Its common features were the attempt to shield individuals from. risk through governmental safety nets, to provide full employment. through fiscal measures, and to promote equality of opportunity. through economic redistribution.
C. Another element of welfare-state capitalism as it emerged from the Depression era was the development of governmental institutions
that were intended to stabilize the capitalist financial system.
D. If there was a master slogan behind the welfare state, it was the. idea of social justice.

II. The welfare state had several intellectual sources: socialism, Christianity, and the new liberalism.
A. From socialism came the ideals of equality and solidarity, which. socialists had long identified with nationalization.
B. But by the 1920s and 1930s, a developing strain of socialist. thinking sought to manage capitalism and protect people from its. negative effects.
C. They sought to make subsistence independent of the marketplace. and guarantee a minimum of support to all.
D. They also sought to maintain high levels of employment, which. increased the power of the working class.

The term “social justice” came into broad usage through the influence of Catholic thinkers and activists.
A. The modern Catholic tradition was articulated in Pope Leo XIII’s. 1891 encyclical “On the Condition of Workers” and in Pope Pius. XI’s 1931 “On the Reconstruction of the Social Order.”
B. A key element of that 1931 encyclical was the nexus between the. market and the family, and this was the doctrine known as the. “family wage.”
C. The encyclicals were antisocialist, but they were also hostile to. free competition.
D. The notion of a right price at which goods are sold implied an. antidynamic view of economic life, and a shared vision of what. was appropriate to each group in society.
E. A related movement within Protestantism, known in the United. States as the “social gospel,” also fed into the New Deal.

IV. Another contributor to the welfare state was the strain of liberalism known in Britain as the “new liberalism” and in the United States. as “progressivism.”
A. It advocated liberty in the sense of a limited state but insisted that. this had to be complemented by positive liberty.
B. One of its forerunners was John Hobson, and this new liberalism was the tradition from which John Maynard Keynes came.
C. Keynes became the most influential economist in the Western world from the 1930s through the 1970s.
D. In the face of the Depression, Keynes offered a series of critiques of government policies of laissez-faire, culminating in his General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).
E. He took aim at the notion of the economy as a self-regulating entity and provided an economic rationale for governments to try to actively combat unemployment, even if it meant running a government deficit.
F. Keynes wanted to use fiscal and monetary policy to influence demand in order to create a high level of employment and an ongoing profitable economy, without state ownership and without overall state control of the economy

Source credit: Professor Jerry Muller, The Catholic University of America.

 

[Cypress]

Quarantine College: economics class notes today

Three general types of capitalist welfare states

A. The conservative welfare state regime is most often found in Catholic countries and stresses job protection and high wages in order to allow a male breadwinner to be the sole support of his family.

B. The social democratic welfare state regime is found in the Nordic countries and stresses government provision of social services and income supports to create a more egalitarian society and to allow both men and women to work.

C. The liberal welfare state version is found in the United States and, to a lesser degree, in other Anglo-Saxon countries and tries to offer government support for those who can’t work in the job market. It generally has looser labor laws that make it easier to hire and fire people.

 

[Jack]

What is the 'Corporate State'?

Where the State is a 'Corporation', and the inhabitants are the 'Shareholders'.
Each Citizen has a stake in the Success of the Country, and the Country has a stake in each individual Citizen.

 

[Cypress]

According to professor Muller, Adam Smith's key insight is that a healthy and functioning capitalist state is built first and foremost on a seeming paradox:

The state has to be powerful enough to protect private property, which is the foundation of the profit motive and hence economic growth.

But the state also has to be powerful enough to infringe on private property to tax, regulate, and prevent corporate oligarchy .

 

[Dachshynddawg]

The intellectual foundations of welfare state capitalism: Christianity, liberalism, and socialism.

Dear Cypress



Socialism has nothing at all to do with welfare State Capitalism, and the founding father of this political doctrine was a Jew.Also, insofar as liberalism is defined as a political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problems of politics, Welfare State capitalism has got nothing to do with liberalism. That's three strikes, Arse-hole, YOUR OUT !(I can't believe the amount of ignorant bullshit that appears on this forum).




For the guy who originally asked about the nature of Welfare State Capitalism as a political creed, here's my take on the issue...




To begin with, think that what is more interesting than looking at the "intellectual foundations" (NB: that phrase is pretty much meaningless ??) of Welfare State Capitalism is looking at where it first emerged and it was implemented in the real world. The fundamental principles of Welfare State Capitalism are rooted in a political creed known as One Nation Conservatism



The prize for being first to get Welfare State Capitalism up an running goes to the conservative (Tory) politician Benjamin Disraeli who was British Prime Minister in 1868 and again from 1874 to 1880. To be fair, I should not quibble over a handful of years, rather say that the other pioneer of One Nation Conservatism was the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, whom I will briefly discuss later. Getting back to Disraeli, as well as being a Conservative politician, he was also a novelist and his novels often gave a clear insight into his thoughts on the political issues of the day. Before I go on, I'll just briefly note that Disraeli lived an era of tremendous and, for many, turbulent/tumultuous change in England. The Industrial Revolution (1760) triggered massive growth in the population and levels of urbanisation, and had, by the time of Queen Victoria's coronation in 1837, also given rise to a rapacious industrialised capitalist economy, especially in the big English cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester. It was a "dog-eat-dog", laissez faire capitalist economy running wild, and D
during this period of English history there was widespread and cruel exploitation of the working class, by the wealthy owners of large factories and other types of businesses. Many workers lived in grinding poverty. There was a massive disparity between the income/wealth of the rich capitalist elites and that of the workers on the bottom rung of the social hierarchy. (Much like the United States today in some ways ?!) Charles Dickens, the great Victorian novelist, paints a vivid and heart-rending picture of the harsh privations many of London's poor suffered in Victorian England (his novel "Oliver Twist", for example, provides an unforgettable look into the realities of life for Victorian London's poor. It's a great read and I recommend it to you; Dickens was a rare literary genius).




Getting back to Disraeli, I mentioned that as well as being a British Prime Minister, he was a novelist. Here is a passage- relevant to the OP - that comes from a novel he wrote called "Sybil" in 1845. Britain, in Disraeli's view, Britain was made up of...





"Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are ignorant of each others habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets." Who are formed by a different breeding, are fed different food, are ordered by different manners and are governed by different laws."




The two nations are the ARISTOCRACY and the POOR, and Disraeli had a vision of a British society that was not fractured into two mutually exclusive classes but unified as "one nation". Hence the origin of the term One Nation Conservative. One Nation Conservatism is not inherently opposed to capitalist, market-driven economic policies; it is not based on any kind of collectivist or socialist political ideology. In order to solve the problem of Britain's cleaving into two separate "nations" (a wealthy elite/aristocracy and a poor working class) as a result of industrialisation and inequality, Disraeli conceived the doctrine One Nation Conservatism, namely, a system of measures to improve the lives of the people, provide social support and protect the working poor.





Disraeli justified his ideas by his belief in the concept of "organic society". The notion of organic society is a fundamental tenet of Conservative political philosophy; it is a multi-faceted principle, and the aspect of organic society that Disraeli emphasised in his One Nation Conservatism was the claim that different social classes have natural obligations towards one another. He saw society as naturally hierarchical -( this is another fundamental tenet of all Conservative political philosophy) - and especially stressed the obligations of of the privileged,wealthy, powerful, high-status elites at the top of the social hierarchy to those below. This was a continuation of the feudal concept ofNoblesse Oblige which accepted that the aristocracy to be generous, charitable and honourable.




Disraeli's One Nation Conservatism identifies its approach as pragmatic and non-ideological. It accepts the need for flexible policies. Disraeli justified his view pragmatically by arguing that should the ruling class become indifferent to the suffering of the people, society would become unstable and social revolution would become a possibility.




In his second term as British Prime Minister between 1874 and 1880. Disraeli set about bridging the chasm between Britain two insular "nations," his government passed a number of legislative reforms in this period that were expressly designed to improve the lives of the working class, including...



* The Artisan Dwellings Act (which mandated slum clearance and public housing works).0

* The Employers and Workmen Act (which made it legal for trade unions to strike),

* The Rivers Pollution Act (which regulated the disposal of waste)

* The Sale of Food and Drugs Act (which established standards of safety and purity).

* The Factory Act (which limited the work hours of women and children)

* The Public Health Act (which modernised sanatry codes throughout Britain)

* The Education Act

* The Reform Act (which gave a franchise and voice to the urban, male, working class for the first time).




Taken together these reforms represented the biggest instalment of social reform passed by any government in the 19th century. However, it is essential to emphasise that they were NOT intended to be an repudiation of "Laissez - Faire" Conservative orthodoxy On the contrary, they were passed to make more substantive state intervention unnecessary. They gave the working class the means to be self-reliant not dependent on state subsidy.





TRUMP AND DISRAELI




Like Disraeli Trump was an audacious outsider, he rocked the world when he "came from nowhere" to win the 2016 US Presidential election. Also like Disraeli, Trump is alive to the grievances of the working classes, he knows that traditional conservatism (and the neo-liberal economic approaches that Conservative administrations in the UK and the US have implemented for most of the past four decades) have not always been appreciative of these grievances and he is convinced that the entrepreneurial rich and the US working classes share many of the same values, whether they be family, faith, liberty or freedom. Hence Trump's determination to remove the shackles of regulation that continue to stymie the small and larger businesses that employ working class Americans.




Now, it might be true that Disraeli's 19th century, Victorian aristocracy and working class shared different tastes from the upper classes and working classes in 21st century America. In Disraeli's time they were far less tame than their counterparts in the US today, and delighted in: gambling; drink; the music hall; whoring/brothels and blood sports. By and large they preferred zest to respectability. But the fact remains, as Trump knows, as Disraeli knew, the Conservative party, if properly led, can unite the upper class and working class, by providing them with the freedom they need to exercise their skills and talents as they see fit, not as the interventionist state dictates that they should exercise their skills and talents.




When Trump won the US Presidency in 2016, he was widely credited with achieving one of the greatest political upsets in American history and, in the process, revolutionising the political landscape in the US. He also ushered in a renewed opportunity for for an overdue American-style One Nation Conservatism. It just worked for Boris Johnson in the UK. Boris campaigned as as a One Nation Conservative and he won the UK General Election with a thumping majority in the House. Despite this wretched COVID-19 virus bringing the American 2020 election campaign to a grinding halt. I am still confident that Trump's style of One Nation Conservatism will reward him with a landslide victory on 3rd November this year.


Dachshund

 

[Cypress]

I am not going to wade through that word salad.

The capitalist welfare state we all benefit from is strictly owed to intellectual traditions of equality and social justice originating from socialism, the Catholic church, and liberalism.

Without socialism, bourgeois practices and the egotistical principle of private ownership gave rise to the "people of the abyss" described by Jack London and earlier by Engels.

Only the competition with socialism and the pressure of the working class made possible the social progress of the twentieth century and, all the more, will insure the now inevitable process of rapprochement of the two systems. It took socialism to raise the meaning of labor to the heights of a moral feat. Before the advent of socialism, national egotism gave rise to colonial oppression, nationalism, and racism. By now it has become clear that victory is on the side of the humanistic, international approach.

The capitalist world could not help giving birth to the socialist, but now the socialist world should not seek to destroy by force the ground from which it grew. Under the present conditions this would be tantamount to the suicide of mankind. Socialism should ennoble that ground by its example and other indirect forms of pressure and then merge with it.

- Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov

 

[Cypress]

^^ I am not going to wade through that word salad.

The capitalist welfare state we all benefit from is strictly owed to intellectual traditions of equality and social justice originating from socialism, the Catholic church, and liberalism.

Without socialism, bourgeois practices and the egotistical principle of private ownership gave rise to the "people of the abyss" described by Jack London and earlier by Engels.

Only the competition with socialism and the pressure of the working class made possible the social progress of the twentieth century and, all the more, will insure the now inevitable process of rapprochement of the two systems.

It took socialism to raise the meaning of labor to the heights of a moral feat. Before the advent of socialism, national egotism gave rise to colonial oppression, nationalism, and racism. By now it has become clear that victory is on the side of the humanistic, international approach.

The capitalist world could not help giving birth to the socialist, but now the socialist world should not seek to destroy by force the ground from which it grew. Under the present conditions this would be tantamount to the suicide of mankind. Socialism should ennoble that ground by its example and other indirect forms of pressure and then merge with it.

- Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov

 

[Truck Fump / h1b]

so what is it when banks and corps get trillions to support the stock market, and working people (mostly without investments) get a 4 month unemployment extension?

 

[Dachshynddawg]

so what is it when banks and corps get trillions to support the stock market, and working people (mostly without investments) get a 4 month unemployment extension?

That's because they're perceived as being "too big to fall."

 

[Cypress]

so what is it when banks and corps get trillions to support the stock market, and working people (mostly without investments) get a 4 month unemployment extension?

Generally speaking, that is oligarchic capitalism.

Capitalism is a continuum, there is not one single pigeon hole.

The United States has a capitalist economy with elements of oligarchy and a liberal social welfare state. The people I vote for more frequently support the later; the people you vote for more frequently support the former

 

[Truck Fump / h1b]

Generally speaking, that is oligarchic capitalism.

Capitalism is a continuum, there is not one single pigeon hole.

The United States has a capitalist economy with elements of oligarchy and a liberal social welfare state. The people I vote for more frequently support the later; the people you vote for more frequently support the former

I only voted once, for harry brown.

is biden for healthcare for all?

 

[Truth Detector]

The intellectual foundations of welfare state capitalism: Christianity, liberalism, and socialism.

Welfare States fail. Capitalism is the ONLY economic theory that works. The less interference from Government apparatchiks, the better they system.

Centralized thinking and control are theories for morons who cannot learn from history.

 

[Truth Detector]

Three general types of capitalist welfare states
A. The conservative welfare state regime is most often found in Catholic countries and stresses job protection and high wages in order to allow a male breadwinner to be the sole support of his family.

This system doesn't work. The notion that Government can demand the level of wages private enterprise should pay is moronic. The notion that EVERYONE be paid some arbitrary living wage is moronic as well.

B. The social democratic welfare state regime is found in the Nordic countries and stresses government provision of social services and income supports to create a more egalitarian society and to allow both men and women to work.

This system only works partially well in Nordic countries with very homogeneous small populations in HUGE countries with vast natural resources.

C. The liberal welfare state version is found in the United States and, to a lesser degree, in other Anglo-Saxon countries and tries to offer government support for those who can’t work in the job market. It generally has looser labor laws that make it easier to hire and fire people.

Again, the welfare state requires the elimination of liberties and the creation of Government dependency which isn't good for ANYONE.

 

[Truth Detector]

What is the 'Corporate State'?

Where the State is a 'Corporation', and the inhabitants are the 'Shareholders'.
Each Citizen has a stake in the Success of the Country, and the Country has a stake in each individual Citizen.

What a pile of nonsense.

 

[Cypress]

Here is my plug for market economies. Such as they are.

The emerging market economies of India and China have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty.

The socialist model India was trying to follow in the 1960s and 70s obviously pales in comparison.

 

[serenity]

The intellectual foundations of welfare state capitalism: Christianity, liberalism, and socialism.

anyone know how easy this is to debunk, Jerry Muller, Professor at the Cathoic University of America? It is no different than debunking Einstein's relative time theory. So God and science both take the hit as does academia and arts training people to adopt vocabulary as the salvation for being timed apart reproductions in plain sight.

 

[Cypress]

anyone know how easy this is to debunk, Jerry Muller, Professor at the Cathoic University of America? It is no different than debunking Einstein's relative time theory. So God and science both take the hit as does academia and arts training people to adopt vocabulary as the salvation for being timed apart reproductions in plain sight.

Professor Muller is a well respected scholar of economics, intellectual history, and philosophy.

My contribution here is to improve the internet. Dr. Mullers opinion, thoughts, and insights are worth at least as much consideration as cryptic, incoherent posters; barely educated Trump supporters limited to an 8th grade vocabulary; or message board bigots whose only real expertise is internet porn and moonshine distilling

 

[Geeko Sportivo]

so what is it when banks and corps get trillions to support the stock market, and working people (mostly without investments) get a 4 month unemployment extension?

Ihe answer is Trumptardation!

Your Daddy Trump has been asking the Fed for a fractional interest rate! Duh!

I call that Trumptardation.

 

[BattleofHodow]

Welfare States fail. Capitalism is the ONLY economic theory that works. The less interference from Government apparatchiks, the better they system.

Centralized thinking and control are theories for morons who cannot learn from history.

Where's your Libertarian Utopia?

Libertarianism stinks, which is why no one chooses it.

 

[serenity]

Professor Muller is a well respected scholar of economics, intellectual history, and philosophy.

My contribution here is to improve the internet. Dr. Mullers opinion, thoughts, and insights are worth at least as much consideration as cryptic, incoherent posters, barely educated Trump supporters limited to an 8th grade vocabulary, or message board bigots whose only real expertise is internet porn and moonshine distilling

Gee, intellectual history compared to reproductions timed apart as spaced apart now. where is the missing link between actual existing and theoretical/theological/mythological/sociological existence life must originate beyond timed apart now?