In September, King Willem Alexander gave his first budget speech in which he used the term welfare state. He claimed that Dutch society would be moving away from a ‘welfare state’ to a ‘participation state’.
His definition of a participation state is one where people must take responsibility for their own future and create their own social and financial safety nets, with less help from the national government.
Many people took this to mean that people of less means would have to find some way to survive on their own. This is true but there is another aspect of a ‘participation society’ that most people tend to forget. That is the role of the participation society of those with more means.
The idea here is if the government is to stimulate a society where everyone can participate, then those with more means have arguably a larger role to play then those with less means. This type of society is only possible if all members of the society buy into the process. The main reason for this ‘all involved’ process is that those of lesser means can never ‘create their own social and financial safety nets’ if the basis of the economy is based on ‘exploitation of the masses’. Unfortunately, most so-called democratic free market societies are actually exploitative societies where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
You see like any other commodity, money has limited availability. Now I am aware that money is a complicated financial model that seems endless but when you look at the basic aspect of money, if someone gets more, someone is getting less. Even though governments can just print more money, this money has to be backed up by something else, oil, gold, silver or in our situation foreign exchange.
The goal of this article is to have you think about the coming change in our society because just like in Holland, we live in a ‘welfare state’, even though many people fall through the cracks. The change to a participation society will have serious consequences on us and if something is not done to change the exploitative nature of our economy, we will all suffer.
Kendall Dupersoy