Libertarian Delusions and the Machinery of Empire: Welfare as Alibi, Not Engine

I’ll say again, I am not British, and I do not vote in British elections. But the illusions of British libertarians are not unique to Britain. They are simply a provincial variation on the same pathology that infects the entire Anglosphere. From London to Los Angeles, we see the same misplaced rage, the same performative hostility to welfare programs—programs which, for all their faults, are not the true cause of our ruin. It is time to say so without apology: the empire is collapsing, and it is not collapsing because of pensioners and food stamps. It is collapsing under the weight of its own parasitic elites and the vast security bureaucracies they have built to protect themselves.

Alan Bickley’s critique of Alex Zychowski’s welfare fetishism deserves close attention. In tone, it is polite; in content, it is devastating. Zychowski, a British libertarian activist, surveys the wreckage of his country and somehow arrives at the conclusion that the chief villain is the “workshy” poor. This is not just bad analysis. It is a convenient distraction that spares the real centers of power any scrutiny.

Bickley is correct to note that Britain’s welfare system, whatever its inefficiencies, is not where the empire’s money—or its rot—truly resides. The idea that the working man’s taxes are being drained by single mothers and disability claimants is a fantasy sold by the real public looters. The actual beneficiaries of Britain’s inflated trillion-pound budget are the same beneficiaries we see in Washington: arms manufacturers, security contractors, intelligence agencies, NGOs, quangos, and a sprawling caste of professional mediocrities whose entire careers depend on state coercion and ideological conformity.

This is not a matter of accounting pedantry. It is a matter of political focus. Every time a libertarian like Zychowski trains his fire on welfare recipients, he is doing the work of the state’s real masters. The modern regime does not fear libertarians who rail against “benefits culture.” It welcomes them. Why? Because such arguments leave untouched the actual machinery of control. They do not mention the intelligence budgets, the propaganda subsidies, the digital surveillance infrastructure, or the constant stream of tax-funded warfare that props up a collapsing global order.

In America, the same delusion dominates. For decades, Beltway libertarians—usually housed in think tanks funded by defense contractors—have harped on welfare reform while ignoring the fact that the United States spends over a trillion dollars annually on its military-industrial complex. This is not an accident. It is ideological theater. They mouth slogans about “small government” while the largest, most destructive apparatus in human history metastasizes under their nose.

What is “welfare” compared to this? SNAP recipients aren’t funding the CIA. Medicaid doesn’t underwrite regime change in Africa or bail out failed banks. The Pentagon’s budget alone could fund universal healthcare and housing for every American, with change left over. But you will not hear a word about that from the professional libertarians. They are too busy writing columns about student loans and the injustice of food stamps.

This is not just cowardice—it is strategic irrelevance. A libertarianism that attacks the last surviving functions of social solidarity, while ignoring the empire’s core mechanisms of extraction, is worse than useless. It becomes a tool of empire. When Americans complain that they are being looted, and the response is to cut their Social Security while leaving the State Department and Lockheed Martin untouched, that is not liberty—it is liquidation.

Bickley makes another essential point: much of modern welfare is not even redistribution in the traditional sense. It is managerial theater. The poor are not empowered—they are processed. Bureaucrats do not administer aid so much as they administer compliance. A significant portion of welfare spending goes not to the needy, but to the armies of middle-class professionals hired to surveil, supervise, and report on them. These people are not helping—they are embedding the ideology of state dependence while insulating themselves from the consequences of the system they uphold.

And yet even this is not the core problem.

The core problem—unaddressed by Zychowski, and rarely touched even by Bickley—is that modern welfare is the camouflage under which the empire protects itself. It is the moral alibi for a fundamentally extractive regime. It is why every new war is justified as a humanitarian intervention, every censorship law as a shield for the vulnerable, every budget increase as a gesture of compassion. Behind the image of the pensioner or the disabled child stands the real beneficiary: the technocrat, the consultant, the intelligence analyst, the NATO liaison officer, the DEI commissar, and the global investor who counts on social peace while he harvests the remains of the productive economy.

We see this clearly in America. Welfare was never the cause of the national debt. The endless wars, the financial bailouts, the COVID subsidies to corporations, the green energy rackets, the migrant relocation subsidies—all of this is orders of magnitude greater than anything spent on housing benefits or food stamps. And yet the political class, aided by its court libertarians, obsesses over entitlements for the poor while handing trillions to oligarchs and foreign dictators.

If we are serious about saving what remains of our nations, we must reject this deflection. The goal is not to abolish “welfare” in the abstract. The goal is to dismantle the administrative and military architecture of the globalist regime that uses welfare as its shield. Yes, in a saner society, communities would take care of their own. Yes, private charity would do what bloated bureaucracies cannot. But we are not in that society. We are in a collapsing imperial state that uses the rhetoric of care to justify domination.

Welfare is not the disease. It is the bandage that conceals the wound.

The real question for any serious libertarian—or nationalist, or populist—is not how to trim the benefit rolls. It is how to defund and destroy the security state, the propaganda complex, and the vast network of imperial finance that sustains the regime. Until that is done, obsessing over pensions and food aid is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic—only worse, because it convinces people that the iceberg is a myth.

Bickley, to his credit, understands this. His critique of Zychowski is calm but devastating. The welfare fetish is not just analytically wrong—it is morally grotesque and politically suicidal. In both Britain and America, the empire hides behind the image of the vulnerable while building systems that crush them. To attack the image is to strengthen the mask.

Attack the power instead.