Probably true, in the 19th century workers were making some progress but there was a lot of long hours, still high poverty and the beginnings of the Welfare state was created in England and Germany like state pensions, workers comp because people wanted a higher material well being. Also, Trump followers want welfare for senior citizens like Medicare and social security but damned young people.

Sometimes to increase poverty in places like California which recently rise the minium graduallyto 15 an hour but has expensive housing which is not address.

Socialism is not the safety net. Socialism is state control of production, the soft fascism I mentioned. In America increasing socialism has led to an increased poverty of spirit evident in such things as collapsing inner cities.

Material comfort is a necessary but insufficient requirement for worldly happiness. America’s failure is in our belief that it is also sufficient.

The problem is that it is difficult to seek higher values when one is consumed by the fear and despondency that comes from being unable to acquire the basic necessities of life such as food and shelter. I know some folks who make slightly above minimum wage, and while some are students, some are not. Without the benefit of food stamps, some of these folks would simply not make it. We don’t have a culture where one can grow their food and live off the land or where you can live in the same immediate vicinity one works at (at least usually). Food costs. Rent costs (even in the poorest of areas).

It isn’t “socialism” to insist that people who have chosen to work should not suffer the indignity of still being in dire need. The policies required to address this would be complex as the cost of living varies with region, but it seems that making government smaller and doing less is not really a viable or just option.

“The persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this….

Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and in such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the debased sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades. (In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to this end imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to carefully conceal such feelings. This active and tense competition comes to dominate all human thought and does not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.)

The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them toward physical bloom, happiness, and leisure, the possession of material goods, money, and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures….

Western society has chosen for itself the organization best suited to its purposes and one I might call legalistic….
If one is risen from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames. (An oil company is legally blameless when it buys up an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to purchase it.)…

Should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening….

Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtle and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones….”
http://harvardmagazine.com/sites/default/files/1978_Alexander_Solzhenitsyn.pdfwell-

Economics and politics are the fruit of the human soul not it’s formative agents. Too much political economy ignores that which is why political economy policy always becomes ideological in its essence and therefore destructive to truth.

It is not just language that is crucial but the understanding that all grand economic theories are lies. Even when they purport to be observations of human behavior they always are about control.

Take two words: creation and wealth. Both in the above discussion are assumed to be good but they are left undefined. The consequences left in the realm of assumption in much the same way as those critiqued.

Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things will he added to you.

We humans in our disordered state can never achieve the good by our own means.

The more people practice what is necessary to conquer sin the better order there will be. Anything else is futile if not destructive and tends toward participation in the myth of progress perpatrated by the nihilist modern mind.

I vote none of the above.