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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

New Presence: "Brave New Welfare State" (now online for free)

My article is now free access on The New Presence web site and is currently featured on the home page:  http://www.new-presence.cz/.  TNP is a prestigious political-cultural journal and influential in Europe.  It is the the English version of Pritomnost, which is the successor to an older journal going back to the foundation of Czechoslovakia.  Many prominent intellectuals have published there, and both the Nazis and Communists drove it underground at various times.   

 

The summer issue may get some wider attention because it is devoted to American topics.

 

The piece raises larger issues of the growth of the welfare state, with the Obama health plan providing the hook.  But it uses some fathers' and family issues as evidence, and they included a short excerpt from my book, Taken Into Custody

 

Stephen

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AMERICAN PHENOMENA / TNP SUMMER 2010

It Happens First in America: The Brave New Welfare State

Stephen Baskerville

America, not Europe, is on the cutting edge of the welfare state.

 

"…do we not in fact stand as a kind of warning to the West, revealing to its own latent tendencies?" – Václav Havel

 

Like most trends, it is happening first in America.

American conservatives lament that President Barack Obama's health plan makes the United States just another "European-style" socialist state. Leftists likewise are overjoyed that the US has "finally joined the ranks of civilized nations," as Diane Francis writes in the Huffington Post.

Yet the US is in fact doing more than this. At precisely the time when Europeans are confronting the limits of the welfare state, the US seems determined to vastly expand its own. Noting problems in Britain's National Health Service (NHS) and weak government efforts to reform it, Janet Daley writes in the Daily Telegraph, "The US government, meanwhile, is galloping doggedly in the opposite direction, bizarrely determined to occupy precisely the ideological ground which Britain is abandoning.

But this is not 1948, and Obama's health plan is not the NHS. The US is not catching up to Europe. As usual, it is pushing the envelope and taking us into new, uncharted territory.

For the rest:  http://www.new-presence.cz/

 

 

 

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Stephen Baskerville, PhD
Associate Professor of Government
Patrick Henry College
10 Patrick Henry Circle
Purcellville, Virginia  20132

 


From Turner Publishing:

 

Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family

 

Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family

STEPHEN BASKERVILLE, PhD

 

"This book is a tremendous and much-needed report on how family courts and government policies are harming children."     -- Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum

 

 

For more than 80 articles and studies in mainstream publications on the abuses of the divorce industry, see www.stephenbaskerville.net.

 

 

 

 

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