Quote Originally Posted by Gelatinous Cube
Actually, Socialism and a Welfare state are very workable ideas. The problem is that is ungodly difficult to implement, given that you need a strong government to guide it. Considering that a strong government is also freer to skim off the top, it's a catch-22. The problem isn't that Socialism is unworkable, in my opinion, so much as it is simply impractical.
The state apparatus continues to grow in every modern country. This is due firstly to the growing complexity and interdependence both within each society and between different societies. And secondly to the law of bureaucracy that says all bureaucracies will feed on society if left unchecked.

This phenomenon has nothing to do with socialism.

Margaret Thatcher tried -- and God knows she tried -- to cut back state influence and bureaucracy over nearly twenty years of majority government, and the end result was that the size of the British state apparatus grew with over ten percent and British society was more regulated than ever before. The same thing can be observed in the United States where the federal government grew even during the Reagan years, notwithstanding the Gipper's motto that government is peoples' worst enemy.

The explanation for that is to be found in the free market policies that these two leaders implemented. Free markets are not free at all, they have to construed and regulated in order to work. The more services a state turns over to the market, the more regulation is necessary, the more arbitration will be required, the more damage will have to be controlled and paid for by the state through taxes (think: savings & loan scandal in the United States).

And narrowing 'Socialism' down to certain problems in France as one poster did can hardly be taken seriously.