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181 " The idea that it was the state’s business to know what was good for people—while we accept it uncomplainingly in school curriculums and hospital practices—smacked of eugenics and perhaps euthanasia. "
― Tony Judt , Ill Fares the Land
182 " If 1989 was about re-discovering liberty, what limits are we now willing to place upon it? Even in the most ‘freedom-loving’ societies, freedom comes with constraints. But if we accept some limitations—and we always do—why not others? Why "
183 " otherwise—to deny distinctions of class or wealth or influence—is just a way to promote one set of interests above another. "
184 " Keynes’s warning on this matter: “[i]t is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition. "
185 " Take humiliation: what if we treated it as an economic cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to ‘quantify’ the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens as a condition of receiving the mere necessities of life? "
186 " It is tempting to conform: community life is a lot easier where everyone appears to agree with everyone else, and where dissent is blunted by the conventions of compromise. "
187 " We face today two practical dilemmas. The first can be succinctly described as the return of the ‘social question’. "
188 " how was a liberal society to respond to the poverty, overcrowding, dirt, malnutrition and ill health of the new industrial cities? How were the working masses to be brought into the community—as voters, as citizens, as participants—without upheaval, protest and even revolution? "
189 " The history of the 20th century West is in large measure the history of efforts to answer these questions. The responses proved spectacularly successful: "
190 " The second dilemma we face concerns the social consequences of technological change. "
191 " The likely consequences of this coming age of uncertainty—when a growing number of people will have good reason to fear job loss and long-term redundancy—will be a return to dependency upon the state. "
192 " a political class deeply sensitive to its moral and social responsibilities. "
193 " Politically speaking, ours is an age of the pygmies. "
194 " If we compare the gap separating rich and poor, whether measured by overall assets or annual income, we find that in every continental European country as well as in Great Britain and the US, the gap shrank dramatically in the generation following 1945. "
195 " The disappearance of so many regimes so closely bound to a revolutionary narrative marked the death knell of a 200-year promise of radical progress. "
196 " Moreover, it was social democracy and the welfare state that bound the professional and commercial middle classes to liberal institutions in the wake of World War II. "
197 " Whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think. "
198 " high taxation was not regarded in these years as an affront. On the contrary, steep rates of progressive income tax were seen as a consensual device to take excess resources away from the privileged "
199 " For three decades following the war, economists, politicians, commentators and citizens all agreed that high public expenditure, administered by local or national authorities with considerable latitude to regulate economic life at many levels, was good policy. "
200 " Even at their height, the Scandinavian welfare states left the economy to the private sector—which was then taxed at very high rates to pay for social, cultural and other services. What Swedes, Finns, Danes and Norwegians offered themselves was not collective ownership but the guarantee of collective protection. With the exception of Finland, Scandinavians all had private pension schemes—something that would have seemed very odd to the English or even most Americans in those days. But they looked to the state for almost everything else, and freely accepted the heavy hand of moral intrusion that this entailed. "