When we are forced to choose, we must place the freedom above of the equality; because the freedom absence necessarily leads to the injustice and inaquality form coarsest: the absolutism. (Karl Popper) Traditionally, the rights of a citizen were a negative concept: it was free of some thing, as persecution, arbitrary arrest, censorship or coercion. Currently, the right word comes gaining each time plus a claim direction, being a positive concept: right of housing, school, hospital, retirement etc. However, such goods and services do not grow in trees. The State, to supply them, needs to take off before other individuals. The government acts mere as a transference agent, being with a good part of the resources to support its apparatus bureaucratic. The degree of state intervention in the life of the individuals is increasing, and the democratic process, as we know since Aristotle, does not hinder the abuse of this power - always coercitive, placing in risk the freedom. The dog does not bite the hand that feeds it. If freedom means independence, dependence represents the opposite. How much bigger the degree of dependence of the citizens stops with the state, lesser benevolence the freedom of these. Richard Pipes, in Property and Freedom, made a deep historical study of the increase of this dependence, mainly in the United States. Its conclusions are not nothing favorable to the model of welfare state, increasing since the New Deal de Roosevelt. The vacant declarations, as the guarantee of a worthy and comfortable life, deposit in the government an arbitrary power, reducing the individual freedom and many resulted times generating unsatisfactory. The nature of the bureaucracy will be always to search an increase of its size and power. Thus, while the slice of the gross domestic product of the government was of ones 4% in 1870, it reached practically one terço in the decade of 1990. Between 1950 and 1980, the civil costs of the social welfare had grown, in steady dollars, twenty times, while the population only folded. A good part of the population lives partially total or to the costs of state transferences, creating one high degree of dependence. The results are not entertainers. The state interference to the force in the freedom of the contractual parts if gives of innumerable forms, as minimum wages, control of prices and rents, quotas racial, pressure on banking loans, subsidies and tariffs etc. As consequence, the principle of the private contractual freedom is under risk, together with the institution of the property. This leaves of being a natural law and starts to be conditional, depending on the will of the politicians. Pipes follows in its book showing diverse cases of failure of these measures, that besides generating resulted diametrical opposing to the waited one, usurp the right of private property. It remembers that democratic procedures to choose governments automatically do not assure the respect for the civil laws of the citizens, citing the case of Napoleão III as an example.
We also have Hitler, whose Broken Nacional-Socialista it arrived at the power for votes, or Hugo Chávez, recently in Venezuela. After its analyses, Pipes concludes that what is evident is that the social welfare, that intends to supply more of the one than the basic necessities, in the truth makes with that the poverty increases. The launching of the program of war against the poverty enters in 1965 and 1993, the band of the population that lives below of the line of poverty in the United States went up of about 12,5% for 15%. This occurred during a period where the expense with the social welfare increased less of of USS 50 billion per year for more than USS 320 billion. Pipes explains this for the fact of the system of welfare state to create dependence, that promotes in turn the poverty. The generous social welfare, that if does not restrict to supply emergencies, but that it tries to produce a life artificially comfortable, is not onlyharmful to the principle of the property, indispensable to the freedom concept, but also it provokes its proper failure. To Pipes, the main threat to the freedom today does not come of the tyranny, but of the equality - definite equality as identity of you reward. It remembers that the men are different for nature, including force, intelligence, ambition, courage, perseverance and all more than he brings success. The concept of welfare state, as it was developed in the second half of century XX, is incompatible with the individual freedom, therefore it allows that some groups with necessities in common use and demand the right to satisfy them it the cost of all the society, in a process that goes constantly fortifying the power of the State that acts the favor of them. To conclude, the words of the proper author again: The weakness of the rights of property for half such as distribution of the wealth with ends of social welfare and interference in the contractual rights on behalf of the civil laws solapa the freedom in the democracies most advanced, exactly that the accumulation of wealth in peace time and the observance of the democratic procedures give the impression of that everything goes well.