An illustration of why the welfare state is unjust.

Alte writes at Oz Conservative:

I think you're going to see a universal move away from "welfare states", as the traditionalist children start refusing to pay for the decadent lifestyles of the older, childless libertines. They will tend to wish to cancel the inter-generational social contract (which penalizes people with children) and replace it with direct transfers to their own parents and mere poverty-level charity for the childless.

It is currently the opposite. Currently, children pay the most money for the childless (through national retirement programs, for instance), while their own parents go without. Homemakers fare particularly badly under the present system, despite "paying in" the most children. Normally a woman with many children would be wealthier than the others in old age. Now they are poorer, and their children are fed up. My husband and his brother calculated that if they took the money they currently pay into the German retirement fund, and simply handed it to their parents, their parents income would more than double. More and more young people are going to be making that calculation, especially as it's clear to us that such programs will go bankrupt before they are of any use to the people of our own generation.

Support for elderly parents should be met first of all by their children, who owe it to them in filial piety. If they do not have children, then from other family members, or their network/local community. The modern nation-state should not take this burden upon itself, as it can only fund it by depriving citizens of the money that they could be saving for themselves, their parents, and others. This is unjust.

Does the centralization of power in the modern nation-state require the managerial state/bureaucracy for help and to aid in controlling the populace? Once the people have become impoverished through policies that favor the economic elites, the government must implement some sort of social welfare system in order to placate the masses. But the bureaucracy can also become a means of control (and give rise to liberal totalitarianism?).

I'll have to re-read MacIntyre on bureaucracy in After Virtue.