A welfare state targets structural deficits while a neoliberal state targets crime and securitization

Evidence

The differences in social welfare and neoliberal state commitment are revealing. Where the welfare state was committed to ameliorating what were deemed structurally produced or magnified deficits for individuals, the neoliberal condition is committed to calculating optimalities in reductively economic terms, to speculative financialization, and to what Peck and Tickell characterize as “selective ‘deregulation’.” Where the prevailing social commitments for the liberal democratic state had to do with social wellbeing revealed in the registers of education, work, health care and housing, the neoliberal state is concerned above all with issues of crime and corruption, controlling immigration and tax-cut-stimulated consumption, social control and securitization. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1755

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharply contrasts welfare-state and neoliberal commitments along the dimension of what each sees as the state’s core purpose.
• XREF: connects to: Neoliberalism expands state penal power while professing to shrink government — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 179