Socialism and the welfare state

The dangers of the Welfare State are 1) it often is unjust in taking lawful property from individuals through excessive taxation, 2) it substitutes the collective judgment of the government for the freedom and judgment of the individual 3) it discourages initiative and entrepreneurship by individuals, and 4) it leads to excessive government power and hence corruption. The danger of these tendencies of the welfare state were well summarized by Lionel Trilling, a respected man of the contemporary liberal left as quoted by Gertrude Himmelfarb in her book Poverty and Compassion (Knopf Publisher 1991) “Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the moral imagination”.
As the distinquished political economist F. A. Hayek has stated; “The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century”.-more


https://lamar.colostate.edu/~grjan/socialismprimer.html

Let me guess hoppy, you think the US qualifies as a welfare state?

In a modern capitalist economy, some level of unemployment must be taken for granted. This economic fact has been accepted since the demise of Keynesianism. Moreover, it is the duty of a government to maintain a basic level of social security for its citizens.