Ayn Rand Quotes

Treaties or international covenants which provide human rights to food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, or old age would transform the United States into a completely socialistic state.

Even in the United States, 'you have a sort of welfare state, even if you don't want to admit it -- you don't allow people to die on the street.

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

If you throw a welfare state into the middle of a democracy, it’s very hard to get rid of the beast.

Generous, effective, and broadly accessible social welfare policies do not require large government bureaucracies staffed with armies of public servants.

I think most Americans believe in a basic social safety net.

The original purpose of the welfare state was to lift people into self-sufficiency, not to create a permanent underclass dependent on taxpayers.

The welfare state, which grew out of post-war solidarity, has for decades been based on the principle that those who pay into the system are entitled to expect that the safety net will be there for them when they fall on hard times.

Throughout history, politicians have used other people's property to buy themselves power. That is the primary achievement of the welfare state.

The welfare state is institutionalized crime - 'organized plunder,' as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it. It systematizes what is intrinsically wrong: forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.

The Welfare State, which begun in Imperial Germany for the truly indigent and disabled, has now become "everybody's entitlement" and an increasing burden on those who produce.

Europeans call it socialism, Americans call it welfare, and Barack Obama calls it change.

The US, for historical reasons, mistrusts the concept of a welfare state, and this mistrust shows itself nakedly under present US government, which commits uncounted billions of the national wealth to what it calls defence, and is close-fisted in giving money to plans which would ameliorate the grinding poverty of a great part of its people. Quite simply, in Canada you could not get away with that.

The free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism.

I wrote my thesis on welfare policy.

I want a society that provides decent jobs for those who can work and decent security for those can't.

A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.

There is much in American society which I admire, but I have long held the view that the absence of an effective safety net in that country means that too many needy citizens fall by the wayside.

We are not for cutting social welfare and are for more health care.

Instead of a universal basic income, we could have a basic income guarantee. Or, as economists prefer to call it, a negative income tax.

My dream is universal income, with a completely different fiscal system to finance it.

There is much in American society which I admire, but I have long held the view that the absence of an effective safety net in that country means that too many needy citizens fall by the wayside. That is not the path that Australia will tread. Nor do we want the burdens of nanny state paternalism that now weigh down many economies in Europe.

The more the state gives to its citizens, the less they have to earn. That is the basic concept of the welfare state - you receive almost everything you need without having to earn any of it. About half of Americans now pay no federal income tax - but they receive all government benefits just as if they had paid for, i.e., earned them.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

I am a fan of the social policies that you find in Europe