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The real problems are cultural, social, and moral. The welfare state has not only encouraged perverse and destructive behavior, but it has also led to an idolatrous devotion to the central state, with its implied promise of a single and costless political solution to every social ill. Hilaire Belloc described such an outcome as the "servile state," in which a spiritless population is cared for, from the cradle to the grave, by a state apparatus to which it gives its highest allegiance. Over and against such false promises, we should turn once again to the families, churches, and local institutions that we have allowed to atrophy under the domination of the central government, and which constitute what Edmund Burke aptly called the "little platoons" of civilization.

Thomas Woods, The Church and the Market, p. 157.

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