Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Rethinking the selfare state 8
the delivery of social services. Against this backdrop, we then proceed to discuss the
voucher against other policy instruments, and focus on the various design challenges that
inhere in establishing principled and workable voucher programs. In Chapters 3 through
10, we pursue the technical and normative complexities raised by these central design
issues by examining them in a wide range of specific programmatic contexts. These
programs cover many important social services, although they by no means exhaust the
actual or potential domains of voucher systems. We also do not explore systematically
the inherent limits of voucher systems in ensuring access to public goods or services: the
natural monopoly characteristics of some public goods or services, e.g. national defense,
highways, airports, which may render irrelevant voucher systems that critically depend
on fostering demand-side choice and supply-side competition; in other cases even though
supply-side competition is feasible, we do not want demand-side choice, e.g. correctional
services. However, in order to render our domain of inquiry tractable, we have confined
our focus to the major social programs reviewed herein. Chapter 11 draws together some
conclusions from our programmatic reviews for the critical design issues raised by all
voucher systems.
The goals of the welfare state
What is the normative case for the panoply of programs and policies associated with the
modern welfare state? Although the precise contours of the social welfare state, and the
goals which animate it, are contestable, we believe that a careful review of the normative
literature surrounding the welfare state, as well as consideration of the policies that have
actually been adopted in a number of industrialized economies, evidences support for the
five following ends or goals of the welfare state:
1 Regulation of public morality.
2 Building social solidarity.
3 Insuring individual risk.
4 Promoting economic stability.
5 Providing an equitable distribution of resources.
Regulation of public morality
The initial function of social welfare programs was to regulate public morality. Until the
beginning of the twentieth century, it was a commonly held view that socio-economic
disadvantage was an effect, rather than a cause, of social problems. Moral failings, lack
of self-motivation and poor education were counted among the causes of this
disadvantage. 43 In England, the consequence of this view was that social services for the
poor provided under the Poor Law were separated from those available to other citizens.
The services were to be unattractive in order to make dependence on them unappealing, 44
thereby providing an incentive for the poor to abandon an immoral lifestyle. In this twotiered
system, the class of “paupers” was denied the rights and privileges of ordinary
citizens. Marshall points out in Citizenship and Social Class that the British Poor Law
was not about the protection of citizens, but about creating a separate class of the “poor”
who had fallen below the level of citizenship: