[Welfare] states presuppose economic dynamism sufficient to generate investments, job creation, corporate profits, and individuals’ incomes from which come tax revenues needed to fund entitlements. But welfare states produce in citizens an entitlement mentality and a low pain threshold. That mentality inflames appetites for more entitlements, broadly construed to include all government benefits and protections that contribute to welfare understood as material well-being, enhanced security, and enlarged leisure. The low pain threshold causes a recoil from the rigors, insecurities, and dislocations inherent in the creative destruction of dynamic capitalism. The recoil takes the form of protectionism, regulations, and other government-imposed inefficiencies that impede the economic growth that the welfare state requires.
-George Will (commentator, TV pundit, speaker, author, The Conservative Sensibility)
Prof. Don Boudreaux:
‘Redistribution’ requires the existence of something to be redistributed. And because cash, as such, can’t be used as food, clothing, shelter, or for any other human purposes beyond kindling for fires or flooring for the cages of pet hamsters, meaningful ‘redistribution’ requires the existence of real goods and services.
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
