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Welfare Liberalism Analysis

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In light of the reading on “welfare liberalism” it is important to note that there are differences between contemporary liberalism and welfare liberalism that address specific ways the government should be driven towards. Rawls and Dewey being this section by providing the following, “One of the first to make the case for welfare liberalism was T.H. Green, a professor of philosophy at Oxfoard University. The heart of liberalism, Green said, has always been the desire to remove obstacles that block the free growth and development of individuals.” (Liberalism Reading) This also refers to that of its past meaning which referred to the limited intervention of government in the lives of others. He adds, “In the past that meant limiting the powers …show more content…

He adds “The early liberals regarded freedom as a negative thing, he said, for they thought of freedom as the absence of restraint. Someone who was restrained – tied up and locked in jail, for instance – was not free, while someone who was unrestrained was. But Green believed that there is more to freedom than this. Freedom is not merely a matter of being left alone it is the positive power or ability to do something.” Liberalism reading) He argues that how one interprets the concept of freedom is in part what shapes how you formulate your response to the obstacles to freedom. Green goes future to compare welfare-state liberalism to that of socialism. He states that “Socialists want to do more than tame or reform capitalism; they want to replace it with a system of publicly owned and democratically controlled enterprises. Welfare liberals, by contrast, prefer private ownership and generally take a competitive capitalist system for granted. From the perspective of the welfare liberal, the role of government is to regulate economic competition in order to cure the social ills and redress individual injuries wrought by capitalist competition.” (Liberalism reading) The comparison of these two concepts are widely different but yet use similar strategies to incentive people to believe in the

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