Someone showed up in my mentions to defend the welfare state as a necessary mechanism for “redistributing wealth” and so I wanted to very briefly clear this up: The welfare state is a tool of capitalist exploitation. The state empowers capitalists to exploit workers, amassing control over their labor (“wealth”). This exploitation risks immiserating workers to the point of extinction, or possibly rebellion. So, the state—acting as a common committee for managing the interests of the entire capitalist class—expropriates some of that wealth and hands it back to the working class, just enough so that workers can reproduce themselves and capitalists don’t run out of labor. Without the state and capitalists, there is no concentration of “wealth” and resulting exploitation that warrants the creation of a welfare state in the first place.