Why We Need the Welfare State
You can redistribute income and power from capital to labor. But if you want to make sure that the final income distribution is sensitive to differences in household composition, there is no substitute for a universal welfare state.
Only a universal welfare state can guarantee an egalitarian society. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
One of the major historical rationales for the welfare state has been equalizing living standards between similar families with different numbers of workers and dependents. Around the 1970s, this rationale began to fall out of the welfare state discourse, and these days you rarely hear anyone talk about it.
This is a shame, because the horizontal equality case for the welfare state is extremely strong and also helps explain why the welfare state should feature universal benefits rather than means-tested benefits.
To help communicate this argument for the welfare state, I asked Jon White to recreate an old welfare state diagram from 1940s Switzerland.
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