page_title: Criticism of welfare
section_title: Socialist criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Criticism of welfare / Socialist criticism
caption_attribution_description: Norsk bokmål: I november 1944 gjennomförte tyskerne tvangsevakuering av sivilbefolkningen i det indre Finmark og brente deres bosteder. Det lyktes en god del av folket å flykte innover fjellet, hvor de imidlertid stötte på de störste vanskeligheter. Fra svensk side er det igangsatt en effektiv hjelpvierksomhet hvorved store mengder klær og matvarer er distribuert til befolkningen. Bildet viser en fornöydd lappegutt som har fått havregryn og erter. Hjelpen fra Sverige var av stor betydning for menneskerne i det indre Finnmark og kom frem i rett tid.
context_page_description: The modern welfare state has been criticized on economic and moral grounds from all ends of the political spectrum. Many have argued that the provision of tax-funded services or transfer payments reduces the incentive for workers to seek employment, thereby reducing the need to work, reducing the rewards of work and exacerbating poverty. On the other hand, socialists typically criticize the welfare state as championed by social democrats as an attempt to legitimize and strengthen the capitalist economy system which conflicts with the socialist goal of replacing capitalism with a socialist economic system.
context_section_description: Critiques of the welfare state and of social welfare programs have come from various socialists perspectives, ranging from Marxists to anarchists. In these perspectives, criticism of the welfare state often goes alongside criticism of the structural issues of capitalism and the inability for social welfare measures to solve fundamental economic issues which Marxists consider inherent to the capitalist mode of production. Initially, social insurance schemes were promoted by liberals and conservatives to appeal to working class voters to undercut the appeal of socialism. While some socialist parties tolerated social insurance, socialists often viewed advocacy of such programs as antithetical to their goal of replacing capitalism with socialism.
  Marxian socialists argue that modern social democratic welfare policies are unable to solve the fundamental and structural issues of capitalism such as cyclical fluctuations, exploitation and alienation. Accordingly, social democratic programs intended to ameliorate the issues of capitalism—such as unemployment benefits and taxation on profits—create further contradictions in capitalism by limiting the efficiency of the capitalist system by reducing incentives for capitalists to invest in further production. As a result, the welfare state only serves to legitimize and prolong the exploitative and contradiction-laden system of capitalism to society's detriment.
  Democratic socialists such as the American philosopher and mathematician David Schweickart contrast social democracy with democratic socialism by defining the former as an attempt to strengthen the welfare state and the latter as a political movement seeking to create an alternative to capitalism. According to Schweickart, the democratic socialist critique of social democracy is that capitalism can never be sufficiently "humanized" and any attempt to suppress the economic contradictions of capitalism would only cause them to emerge elsewhere. For example, attempts to reduce unemployment too much would result in inflation while too much job security would erode labor discipline. As socialists, democratic socialists aim to create an alternative to capitalism. In contrast to social democracy, democratic socialists advocate a post-capitalist economic system based either on market socialism combined with worker self-management, or on some form of participatory-economic planning.
  Market socialism is also critical of and contrasted with social democratic welfare states. While one common goal of both systems is to achieve greater social and economic equality, market socialism does so by changes in enterprise ownership and management whereas social democracy attempts to do so by government-imposed taxes and subsidies on privately owned enterprises to finance welfare programs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt III and David Belkin criticize social democracy for maintaining a property-owning capitalist class which has an active interest in reversing social democratic welfare policies and a disproportionate amount of power as a class to influence governmental policy.
  Karl Marx famously critiqued the basic institutions of the welfare state in his Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League by warning against the programs advanced by liberal democrats. While Marx proclaimed that the communists had to support the bourgeoisie wherever it acted as a revolutionary, progressive class because "bourgeois liberties had first to be conquered and then criticised", he specifically argued that measures designed to increase wages, improve working conditions and provide welfare payments would be used to dissuade the working class away from socialism and the revolutionary consciousness he believed was necessary to achieve a socialist economy and would therefore be a threat to genuine structural changes to society by making the conditions of workers in capitalism more tolerable through welfare schemes.
  Eduard Bernstein, a reformist social democrat, was skeptical of the welfare state and social welfare legislation. While Bernstein viewed it as somethin
caption: A Swedish Sami boy getting oats and beans from the government's food relief program
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