William Beveridge was the man who was most influential in starting the welfare state. It began with allegedly good intentions, then became a monster, making the problem worse not better and far more expensive. It came to us by way of the Beveridge Report. It is fair to say that the William was sound on Eugenics - see what the Wiki has to say about the man and the policy. It does not quite say that he favoured castrating lesser people but he was certainly thinking about removing them from the gene pool in some fashion or other. He was bright enough to see that the dole would create the poverty trap and screw the poor.
He is not the only one to blame for a dole bill of £437 billion [ £194 billion 'social protection', £32 billion 'personal social services', £122 billion 'health', £89 billion 'education' - source Treasury pie chart below ]
There are plenty of others but he started it. The cost corresponds to some
£7,283 a year for every man woman and child in the land.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Beveridge
QUOTE
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge (5 March 1879 16 March 1963) was a British economist and social reformer. He is perhaps best known for his 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) which served as the basis for the post-World War II Welfare State put in place by the Labour government.Early life and career
William Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and scholar Annette (Akroyd) Beveridge, was born in Rangpur, India (now Rangpur, Bangladesh), on 5 March 1879. After studying at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford, he became a lawyer.Lord Beveridge was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists in particular by Beatrice Potter Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report that he could readily be considered one of their number. However, he was perhaps the best economist among them his early work on unemployment (1909) and his massive historical study of prices and wages (1939) being clear testaments to his scholarship. The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. His continual jousts with Cannan and Robbins, who were trying to wrench the LSE away from its Fabian roots, are now legendary............
Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his Ministry. Beveridge refused, but declared an interest in organising British manpower in wartime (Beveridge had come to favour a strong system of centralised planning). Bevin was reluctant to let Beveridge have his way but did commission him to work on a relatively unimportant manpower survey from June 1940 and so Beveridge became a temporary civil servant. Neither Bevin nor the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry Sir Thomas Phillips liked working with Beveridge as both found him conceited.........
The Report to the Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. Beveridge argued that this system would provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall". It recommended that the government should find ways of fighting the five 'Giant Evils' of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service of some sort, a policy already being worked on in the Ministry of Health.........
Beveridge saw full employment (which he defined as unemployment of no more than 3%) as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 Beveridge Report, and Full Employment in a Free Society (1944) expressed how this goal might be gained. Alternative measures for achieving it included Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of production. The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the war. He believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of society..........
Support for eugenics
Beveridge was a proponent of Eugenics. He argued in 1909 that those men who through general defects are unable to fill such a whole place in industry, are to be recognised as 'unemployable'. They must become the acknowledged dependents of the State... but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood.
UNQUOTE
Whether his last bright idea meant castrating the idle is not explained. There is a lot going for it. Ditto for spaying the idle sluts who get themselves up the duff in order to get council flats at our expense.