disclaimer: I am not a socialist I am an anarchist though find isues without alot of the common opinions held by an-caps speficly especialy the opinions of theirs which overlap with libertarians

There is a claim made by libertarians that "a government with the power to feed you has the power to take everything away," this suports a general libertarian idea that goverment programs such as welfare and healthcare increase government power and thus give the state new tools to exert its athority. Once we are all signed into the government healthcare system we have no choice, no alternatives, and are sitting ducks. Healthcare/welfair are how th government tricks us into giving up more freedom to it. It is a classic slippery sloap argument. It is an argument which makes sense on paper and seems to me that it should be true. But when I look around at the world this argument seems to to be completely false.

In the western democratic world government healthcare/welfare are negetivly correlated with abuse of power not positively correlated with it. The nordic countries are the most socialist western democracies with the largest national healthcare/welfare programs. But they also have some of the lowest levels of corruption, cronyism, suppression of the press, imprisonment of political dissidents, general size of the prison population, and police brutality. they are continually rated highly on free speech indexes and are rated as having some of the most transparent elections and most humane prisons in the western world. The United States is the only western power not to have a universal healthcare system and has much worse off on all of these metrics. Britan has a universal healthcare program less expansive then the ones found in the Nordic countries, and Britan scores better then America but worse then the Nordic countries on most of these indices. In the western world goverment healthcare/welfair are correlated with higher levels of political freedom and lower levels of state authoritarianism.

Libertarians always jump to the example of the comunists states to prove their slippery sloap argument: USSR, cuba, China, North Korea, North Vietnam ect... They point out that these countries had complete state control of the economy and no political freedom what so ever. But this seems completely irrelevant to me. First of all, none of the comunist states emerged out of a gradual slipping into socialism. None of them worked their way up to communism starting from something smaller such as government healthcare. All of them were born in abrupt violent revolution. None of them emerged gradualy. Second, none of them were ever democracies all were run by brutal military dictatorship. Third, none of them abandoned capitalism for communism. They were all fuedalist prior to their communist revolutions.

So to recap: every comunist nation was born of violent revolution within a fuedalist society and was run by military dictatorship. Not a single one arived at communism gradually. Not a single one was democratic. Not a single one had originaly had industrial capitalism. Now lets look at the nordic countries again: they are industrial capitalist societies which are transitioning to socialism gradualy through the democratic process. Not a single totalitarian comunist state was ever born of this process or in these conditions. So to say that democratic socialist programs such as healthcare implemented in an industrial capitalist society is going to lead to totalitarian communism, a system of goverment only ever born out of violent revolution within fuedalist societies, is completely unsupported by history. In fact there does not seem to be any historical connection between democratic socialism and totalitarian communism. They seem to be completely unrelated phenomenon. furthermore, socalist programs such as healthcare are correlated with higher levels of political freedom in the context of democratic western industrialy advanced societies. So the argument that healthcare/welfare will lead to authoritarianism seems to be completely unfounded by all the observable evidence.