A welfare state is totalitarian

A welfare state is totalitarian because it controls the lives of its subjects totally, without limit. Any state is already sovereign but a welfare state is totalitarian because its constitution does not really limit its powers. Because the constitution allows or demands state provision of welfare, there is no real limit to its powers.

Because a welfare state assumes the responsibility of conducting the lives of its subjects, it is totalitarian. And a welfare state by definition assumes the responsibility to make its subjects well. A welfare state has subjects even if is a republic or a democracy because the state has the ultimate power to decide about the lives of the residents and citizens.

A totalitarian state by definition has a state ideology that is dominant in the society. All welfare states have a state ideology that is taught in schools. Schools are considered an essential part of a welfare state. The curriculum of the schools includes the dominant ideology of the welfare state. Therefore, a welfare state can be considered totalitarian.

Health care is another totalitarian aspect of a welfare state. Modern welfare states provide health care that is considered another essential part of the welfare state. The bodies of the subjects are subject to state planning. Drug policy is a prime example of how a welfare state owns the bodies of its subjects and therefore assumes a totalitarian role.

Psychiatry is especially totalitarian because involuntary hospitalization and medication are standard procedures conducted on the bodies of the persons who disagree on the state ideology. Psychiatry is a totalitarian science because it does not have only customers but involuntary subjects whose welfare is imagined to improve by coercive means. Such coercion makes psychiatry especially prone to totalitarian pseudoscience.

My utilitarianism

John Rawls' A Theory of Justice stated that "utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons". Utilitarianism takes seriously the distinction between persons to the extent that utility is felt by each person distinctly. But why should anyone take seriously ethics that makes persons worse off than utilitarianism would? John Rawls and other individualists have such ethics. A person is a construction of the body producing it. Utilitarianism acknowledges that construction and takes it into account in maximizing persons' utilities. But that construction is not sacrosanct to me like it is to extreme individualists. A constraint that each person's utility may never be sacrificed makes persons worse off and therefore I reject that constraint.

Anyway, I reject completely sacrificing persons due to the whims of a lynch mob. I am not a classical Benthamite utilitarian. I refuse to accommodate the desire to harm another person. Instead, I want to maximize the utility to improve one's life. This is similar to John Stuart Mill's classification of different utilities. Most humans want to harm other people when the other people act in a way that is perceived antisocial. States are the worst form of conformism. But I accept self-defense and punishment.