The other day I came up with a saying that basically summarizes the reply to that question. "All Theories are Perfect, all Practices are Flawed and all Politicians Know". Costa Rica has elected a female president to rule us for the next four years. We all know by now that the promises voiced during the campaings are just that, promises, and that once one of the runners gets elected all of them will be filed as "ways to trick the people into electing yet another liar". However people keep believing the lies, specially now when politicians pepper their promises with all kinds of social and political theories that allegedly benefit all.
Some push forward the right wing, libertarian positions, which diminish the role of the State in the market, reduce taxes, promote enterprises and partake in every existing Free Trade Agreement. They tell people that this way everybody - if they decide to take the enterpreneur road - will get a shot at richness and success. To make their package a success, they feed people with lines like giving them back their freedom to chose their own health care (never mention that making health care could become too expensive and then getting the private companies to pay for your medical bills can become a nightmare, unlike now, where we pay 9% of our wage and our employer adds 14% of its own, and we get health care without tricks, without questions, without extra payments), chose your own police service, your own insurance, your own firemen department, your own ambulance service. This is all possible because The Market is mighty and according to the theory, the market supplies for everything and gets everything perfect when let free to function.
What they don't tell you is that this never will happen because this theory - The Perfect Competition Market - is a pipedream, a markup upon which economists try out their theories. This theory is supported by suppositions that won't stand in real life, because in real life companies actually find it far easier to put a bullet in the competitions head than improve their product. Just take a telecomm market, any, with more than 1 operator. Is the service good? Do they treat well their customers? It is the service cheap?
Then again, nothing like labeling the counter theory, the more State-centered one, as a Big Bad Communist Tyranic Proposal backed up by all the bad names of the Globe: Chávez, Castro, China. Is that true? Nope.
I am a pro-State person, in case you haven't realized this so far, so I really have little to say against this theory, but I can say this: Benefactor State, Wellbeing Theory are about the State stepping into the socially sensitive areas to balance out the imperfections of the market. What's the downside of this? That concetrating power, just as it happens also in the "Free Market Model" (because there's still a Government, otherwise why would they care so much about being elected?), always breeds greed and greed is a twin child whose sibling is corruption. Though the idea is great, and the middle of the XXth century proves it can make wonders for the economies around the world, truth is that it requieres great believe, great commitment and great balance from every single element of the State machinery to make it work.
As you page your way through the theories and the proposals about how to make a country a better country, and economy a better economy you realize that all of them trip on the same stone: money. Sadly, the idea of making it better for all of us is noble, but there are no noble men (or women) left, particularly not among those who aspire to get elected (thought there might be a handful of exceptions), and when it comes to it, it is far easier to make happy those who have the most leverage (because lobbyist exist for a reason, and that's not the greater good, also contributions to campaings do come with a payback bill which all politics must honor or die trying to), than making people happy. Well, after all, if the people were satisfied, what leverage would the campaings have? What else could you promise to get elected?
Politics know that and that's why the happily go lying up and down to us so that we vote for them every four years.
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