Welfare State - Criticism and Failings

Criticism and Failings

Critics of the welfare state claim that, in relieving citizens of personal responsibility for their own welfare, the government has inadvertently encouraged irresponsible and immature attitudes, with the result that squalor, ignorance, and idleness are common. In 1980, T. E. Utley, wrote that the welfare state was "an arrangement under which we all largely cease to be responsible for our own behaviour and in return become responsible for everyone else's. The temptations which this way of doing things offers to synthetic anger, fraudulent penitence, all other forms of hypocrisy and the sheer evasion of duty are infinitely too strong for fallen man".