One of the most disconcerting aspects of modern British society is the lack of social responsibility. It is a pervasive trait that can be traced back to the creation of the Welfare State after World War Two, and the authoritarian rule that is associated with many aspects of socialist thinking.

The Welfare State effectively took away individual people’s responsibility for the society in which they were members, and placed it in the hands of the State. To pay for this, and to continue to pay for this Welfare State, it is necessary to maintain high taxation.

It is, perhaps useful to digress briefly to discuss the issue of taxation in more detail. The government has taken the rather patronising position that it can spend people’s own money more wisely. As a result of this, people want to feel the effect of the government spending their money wisely (such as on health-care and education). The problem is, this means that issues, such as ending famine in the Third World, are side-lined. In general, the government, by appropriating responsibility to itself, is expected to be responsible for all the woes that afflict society and the world. However, some charity (such as ending poverty) can only be undertaken effectively by individuals and not by the State; too many people slip through the cracks.

Paradoxically, this is an example of excessive individualism. The State, by removing individual responsibility for the woes of society, ensures that ordinary people are free from guilt; people can then concentrate on themselves, and themselves alone.

This brings me to my main point: the government, by appropriating social responsibility for itself has eroded the idea that individuals have to take an active role within this society. We have a society based on rights, but without the responsibility to complement them. This means that there is now a destructive ideology that all the problems of society have to be, and should be solved by government. The effect of this is ever increasing authoritarianism. It is only in this way that the State can solve everything that it is now expected to be responsible for (by its own actions through the foundation of the Welfare State).

What we need to do is to return to the idea of social responsibility. However, this cannot be achieved unless the government is willing to accept that it has to dismantle its spider-web of bureaucracy and interference in everyday and ordinary life.

If people keep hold of their own money, and are made aware of the fact that they are part of a society to which they owe something, people are more likely to take responsibility of their own for the problems that are prevalent all around us. This was the case in the nineteenth century when groups of people organised themselves into Friendly Societies in order to make everyone’s life better. Notably, these and similar organisation provided an almost national, but independent health-care and educational network.

It is time that we realised that ordinary people have the power to do good in the world as individuals in society; governments merely complicate this fact.

Tags: society, statism, welfare state

This entry was posted by James Arthur Sharpe on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 12:04 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.