State-sponsored welfare programs achieves the utilitarian goal of “greatest happiness”

On the other side, reform liberals and defenders of welfare state redistributive programs can and have also drawn upon the utilitarian standard of the greatest good for the greatest number to justify their policies and proposals. In fact, some of the seminal figures who originated the school of “welfare economics” in the nineteenth century saw their principles of political economy as a subset of utilitarian moral philosophy. To put it into its simplest form, the utilitarian case for welfare state programs that provide income support for the economically worse off and seek to lessen economic inequality in general take their leave from the simple commonsense proposition that the marginal utility of an additional dollar is greater for a pauper than for a millionaire. Think of it this way: Who would derive greater benefit and pleasure from an extra $10,000 in their bank account: you or Bill Gates? Seems pretty clear that it would be you. We’ve all seen audiences at the show The Price Is Right whipped into a veritable frenzy by the prospect of winning a twenty-thousand-dollar Chevrolet, while Donald Trump, who never ceases reminding us he is “really rich,” could hardly care less if someone gave him that same car. Studies have also found that people tend to become steadily happier as their income rises to around $70,000 annually, while increases in income above that point have less effect upon how happy people are. So if you put these observations together with the practical utilitarian imperative to seek “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the logical conclusion would point toward robust programs of income support for people’s basic needs and for crucial goods such as education and health care, financed by a progressive tax system. Those seeking support for the empirical proposition that welfare states perform better in terms of meeting the utilitarian goal of “the greatest happiness,” moreover, point to the results of studies that seek to determine the happiness level of people in different countries around the world. An international team of economists, neuro scientists, and statisticians sponsored by the United Nations, for example, published their third World Happiness Report in 2015. In the Ranking of Happiness based upon their findings, the top ten countries were Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Canada, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia. (The United States was fifteenth.) 23 As commenters on the Huffington Post story about this report were quick to notice, the highest-ranked countries were almost uniformly places with robust welfare state programs. (One wrote: “Them bloody socialists. LOL.” Another wrote: “They all have universal health care, some have free college educations, some have paid maternity and paternity leave. What’s not to be happy about?”) 24