Government ceased to be the rule setter, the facilitator, the insurer, the disbursement agent. It became the doer and the manager.
While the nation-state was the sole political reality in the centuries of empires and superstates, it has transformed itself profoundly in the last hundred years. It mutated into the Megastate. The shift from the national state to the Megastate began in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first small step toward the Megastate was German chancellor Bismarck’s invention in the 1880s of the Welfare State. The other major social program of the period immediately after World War II, the British National Health Service, was the first one (outside of the totalitarian countries) to take government beyond the role of insurer or provider. Hospitals and hospital care under the National Health Service were taken over by government. The people working in hospitals became government employees; and government actually manages the hospitals.
By 1960, it had become accepted doctrine in all developed Western countries that government is the appropriate agent for all social problems and all social tasks. And this held until the 1990s.
ACTION POINT: Use the Internet to check out the service level provided by the British National Health Service. Based upon this example and others which you are aware of, form an opinion as to the effectiveness of government as a provider of health services versus nonprofit and for-profit entities.
Post-Capitalist Society
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker