What is welfare?

Some interesting ideas with which the literature on welfare deals with are as follows (Spiegel, 1971, 24-46):

• Acquisition of wealth

• Separation between use value and exchange value

• The role of money which needs to be exchanged for something else and the issues in satisfaction of wants

• The debate on private property

• Distributive justice or rules of sharing wealth and honor in society

• Justice in exchange

• Cynics’ focus on freedom from wants to make life livable in this world, though not from from purely religious reasons

• Stoics’ insistence on virtue and its practice. The idea that practice of virtue leads to happiness

• Epicurus’s idea that good and pleasure are the aims of life but it is wrong to assume that unlimited quantity of goods is required to satisfy wants

• Greater concern for peace and safety

• Christian (religious) indifference to economic considerations

• Combination of religious virtues with richness