Boston Review on the Welfare State
.. since the 1970s... Republican calls for benefit cuts, Democrats have generally mounted at best a tepid technocratic defense. ( The Frozen Politics of Social Security by James G. Chappel https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-frozen-politics-of-social-security/ The tone of exhausted pragmatism—even among friends of the program—is counterproductive. It is beyond time to fight fire with fire.)
..In 1797.., Paine laid out a scheme in which taxes on land and wealth would be used to fund old-age pensions and a one-time grant to all citizens upon reaching adulthood. For Paine, social insurance was not a question of charity but of right: since ownership of land deprived people of their common inheritance—the earth itself—justice demands that a portion of the rents that flow to property owners be redistributed to everyone. ( Common Property by Elizabeth Anderson..https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/elizabeth-anderson-social-insurance-thomas-paine-friedrich-hayek/ .. How Social Insurance Became Confused with Socialism.. Conservative criticisms of social insurance reflect profound misapprehensions of its relation to private property. Social insurance, in both theory and practice, arose in defense of private property and against communist and socialist threats. Exploring these origins is essential now because they contain important lessons that will help us strengthen social insurance to meet the challenges of post-industrial capitalism. The rich prefer that programs be funded from wages rather than rents, so that workers shoulder the costs. (Despite appearances, in the United States the cost of the employer’s contribution to Social Security and Medicare falls mainly on workers.) Funding benefits with wages poses a formidable political obstacle to diversion of revenues away from workers to other priorities. Benefits graded to contributions are also popular because low, flat benefits are too minimal to appeal to the middle classes, who can self-insure at the low levels promised. ..robust and universal social insurance is a constitutive feature of a sound economy based on private property and markets, not a threat to it. ..Capitalism .. has .. engaged in massive property innovation, including the creation of corporate stock, intellectual property, rights to the broadcast spectrum, and many types of derivatives. In constantly redefining property, capitalism has always engaged in redistribution. )
Comment: In India.. the so called liberatisation of pension and PF funds, seem to have ended in the changing of the pension scheme itself, as welfare then turns to proximate "revdis" that yield better political dividends that assure security system, which become "rights".