Sheldon Richman on Big Government Fans Rallying Around the Surveillance State

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Sheldon Richman says the welfare state, warfare state, and corporate state are of a piece. The government interventions needed to assist well-connected economic interests and to carry out world hegemony create permanent structural economic problems and hardships for the most vulnerable in society. To buy off the victims and reduce the chance of civil strife, the power elite builds an intrusive welfare bureaucracy designed to toss crumbs to the trapped population. Ultimately, one cannot critique the surveillance state without critiquing the rest of the existing political apparatus, which is why fans of the one defend the other.