As the John Locke Foundation prepares to hear remarks from George Will at its 21st anniversary dinner, it’s interesting to review Will’s last address to a JLF crowd.

Circumstances were different in January 2008. Ten months before the presidential election, Will predicted accurately that Democrats would nominate Barack Obama and that Republicans would suffer from a “tsunami.”

Beyond the political prognostication, Will offered some valuable insight about the future of the American welfare state:

Changing American attitudes are creating new challenges for the welfare state, Will said. ?An assumption that Americans have shared for two centuries is now in doubt,? he said. ?The assumption has been that the very process that produces increased wealth would also produce increased family and individual security. Today more and more Americans believe that the very process ? a dynamic market economy ? that produces increased wealth subverts individual and family security.?


?This matters because we have made a bargain: We have decided we want a welfare state,? Will said. ?That?s not an open question in America any more. But having made that choice we have to make a second choice. We have to have a rapid rate of economic growth that will throw off revenue to pay the bill. In order to have that rapid rate of economic growth, we have to have low taxation and light regulations.?


While the welfare state requires the rapid economic growth of a market economy, it also ?breeds a flinching from the insecurities and the uncertainties? of a market-based society, Will said. That means some people demand government security against the dynamic economy the welfare state requires.

Will’s words came to mind as I finished Per Bylund’s essay in the new book Back On The Road To Serfdom. Bylund, a Swede, describes how the welfare-state mentality has infected his native land:

[T]he kind of society that constitutes the Swedish model is unsustainable because of its inherent contradictions; it will eventually crash under its own weight. The welfare state, it must be pointed out, is dependent on people nut using the benefits it makes available to a more than minimal extent. As the system of benefits is expanded, people are expected to not do what they have an incentive to do. Instead, people are supposed to have an impeccable work ethic while being taxed to ridiculous degrees; only then is a welfare state at all possible.

But as we have seen in Sweden’s case, the welfare state erodes the very ethic on which it depends for success. The fact is that the welfare state not only is economically unsustainable but also changes the mind-set of the people it supposedly serves: their incentives are altered, as people are gradually made better off by not working. Tampering with incentive structures eventually has a devastating effect on the economy.