This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 2nd, 2007. I'm Caleb Brown.

How does one argue against the welfare state using the values of those most inclined to defend the welfare state?

philosopher Daniel Shapiro believes he has done so in his book, Is the Welfare State Justified? We spoke following a Cato book forum on his book this week.

My purpose in writing this book was to show that people who defend the welfare state,

using values such as fairness, sustaining a sense of community, open and transparent institutions, providing people with access to basic goods

that are used by defenders of the welfare state actually does not provide a defensive

welfare state. It actually provides a way of defending more

market-based alternatives to the welfare state. So what I'm trying to do is show that people

from different viewpoints, from the dominant viewpoints among those who defend the welfare state,

actually should converge on opposing it, even though they believe they should support it.

So their principles lead to different conclusions than they thought.

Describe a perspective that would lead one to support the welfare state?

Well, the perspective that is used by people to defend the welfare state.

I don't think it actually supports it.

That's the aim of my book, is to actually argue there leads to different inclusion.

But one of the most common ways of

supporting the welfare state is appeal to fairness and in academia these are

called egalitarian's and they basically argue the welfare state is fairer because it basically takes people

who've been victimized by bad luck and compensates them for that bad luck. But the problem is that if you look at how

Social Security actually works, it's just the opposite. You have these intergenerational

inequities that are due to just the bad luck of people being born at a certain time.

Whereas if you have a compulsory, if you have a private pension system where everybody has a pension savings account, then everybody, no matter what generation, gets a good market rate of return.

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