The Economics and Political Science Room
Milton Freidman, Free to Choose:
The first modern state to introduce on a fairly large scale the kind of welfare measures that have become popular in most societies today was the newly created German empire under the leadership of the "Iron Chancellor," Otto von Bismarck. In the early 1880s he introduced a comprehensive scheme of social security, offering the worker insurance against accident, sickness, and old age. His motives were a complex mixture of paternalistic concern for the lower classes and shrewd politics. His measures served to undermine the political appeal of the newly emerging Social Democrats.
It may seem paradoxical that an essentially autocratic and aristocratic state such as pre—World War I Germany—in today's jargon, a right-wing dictatorship—should have led the way in introducing measures that are generally linked to socialism and the Left. But there is no paradox—even putting to one side Bismarck's political motives. Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation. They differ in who should rule: whether an elite determined by birth or experts supposedly chosen on merit. Both proclaim, no doubt sincerely, that they wish to promote the well-being of the "general public," that they know what is in the "public interest" and how to attain it better than the ordinary person. Both, therefore, profess a paternalistic philosophy. And both end up, if they attain power, promoting the interests of their own class in the name of the "general welfare."
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Originally Posted by Chris
