Welfare

The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism.

Planning for Freedom, p. 219

The policies advocated by the welfare school remove the incentive to saving on the part of private citizens. On the one hand, the measures directed toward a curtailment of big incomes and fortunes seriously reduce or destroy entirely the wealthier people’s power to save. On the other hand, the sums which people with moderate incomes previously contributed to capital accumulation are manipulated in such a way as to channel them into the lines of consumption.

Human Action, p. 841; pp. 844–45

An essential point in the social philosophy of interventionism is the existence of an inexhaustible fund which can be squeezed forever. The whole system of interventionism collapses when this fountain is drained off: The Santa Claus principle liquidates itself.

Human Action, p. 854; p. 858

All almsgiving inevitably tends to pauperize the recipient.

Socialism, p. 422

If the will to be well and efficient is weakened, illness and inability to work is caused.

Socialism, pp. 431–32

The problems of poor relief are problems of the arrangement of consumption, not of the arrangement of production activities. They are as such beyond the frame of a theory of human action which refers only to the provision of the means required for consumption, not to the way in which these means are consumed. Catallactic theory deals with the methods adopted for the charitable support of the destitute only as far as they can possibly affect the supply of labor. It has sometimes happened that the policies applied in poor relief have encouraged unwillingness to work and the idleness of able-bodied adults.

Human Action, p. 600; p. 603

The Welfare State with its methods of easy money, credit expansion and undisguised inflation continually takes bites out of all claims payable in units of the nation’s legal tender.

Liberty and Property, p. 25