Social Welfare Spending

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In America, certainly for the social welfare spending, the trend line is way up just for demographic reasons. What I'd rather see is the implicit ownership of governments where government may say, general and general motors, the auto industry,. The private property, again, but in practice, they may have become so dependent upon government to help them that they pretty much wind up acting like a state industry.

Bryan Caplan of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about two books: Eugene Richter's Pictures of the Socialistic Future and F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Both books warn against the dangers of socialism. Pictures of a Socialistic Future, published in 1891 is a dystopian novel imagining what life would be like after a socialist revolution. The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, explores the links between economic freedom and political freedom and the inherent similarities between communism and fascism. Both books look at the German roots of centralized planning and the nature of the people who rise to power when the State is powerful. The conversation includes discussion of the these topics as well as the rule of law and the amount of state control of the economy in Nazi Germany.