SOCIAL SECURITY. - It is the establishment of a series of plans and measures aimed at maintaining social peace and the common welfare. The meanings of the term vary according to the different applications. In the new framing of the problem, the concept may be said to have been developed in the Anglo-Saxon countries after the last great war, as a result of the alarms continually provoked by market fluctuations and by the restlessness of economic and political life, today generally attributed to the liberal regime of competition.
I. THE FOUR FREEDOMS AND THE BEVERIDGE PLAN
The first solemn declaration that appealed to it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's message to the American Congress (Jan. 6, 1941), in which the so-called four fundamental freedoms of man (Atlantic freedoms) were proclaimed, among them freedom from want and from fear.
There followed a broad movement of studies and of social and political achievements which, meeting with the new economic views (v. KEYNES), issued in England in 1944, the war being over, in the famous Beveridge Plan for full employment and social assistance from the cradle to the grave: the first example of an economic plan inspired by the concept of a due liberation of the individual from the major worries of an economic nature, against which the individual is today practically unarmed.
In Italy, on the other hand, by s. s. is meant the narrower field of social providence and assistance to wage-earning and salaried workers and to the unemployed. But in effect a s. s. exists not only for single persons, but also for firms and nations: individuals, enterprises and peoples are, in fact, equally and jointly exposed to grave blows and continuous risks, which take their origin from the general economic and political imbalance, and from the periodic crises that destroy peace, wealth and the possibility of work. Individuals and firms, pressed by unemployment and by ruin, turn to the State to be defended, protected, sustained and restored: States respond with social providence and insurance on an ever broader basis, with ever more general and complete assistance, with measures protecting industries and with financing, and finally with economic plans particularly directed to full employment.
(from Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, 1 [1931], p. 80, fig. 2)
SICLO - Verso e recto di un mezzo s.
II. THE MARSHALL PLAN
In the supranational field, the North American initiative of the E.R.P. (or Marshall Plan) for European reconstruction is well known, replaced before its expiry (Oct. 10, 1951) by the M.S.A. (Mutual Security Agency), whose activity comprises four branches: military aid for common defense; economic aid for an adequate system of mutual security; ECA organization for the countries of Southeast Asia; measures relating to Truman's Point Four on the development of depressed areas of all continents.
Not rigidly tied to schemes, this activity replaces neither the OEEC nor the Schuman Plan (v. UNIONE EUROPEA) nor the European agricultural Pool; but it follows, with criteria of expediency, the emergence in the assisted countries of financial, economic and social needs in relation to the establishment of a mutual security, balancing military necessities with social ones.
The M.S.A. further proposes to develop in Europe a unified economy, greater productivity and a broader liberalization of trade; constituting, finally, the economic instrument of the Atlantic Pact, it assumes the initiative for possible emergency measures. In this sense the concept of social security merges into that of collective security: and it attempts to correct the common defect of approach of all social security plans, consisting in the fact that they remedy only the last visible manifestations of world imbalance, without concerning themselves with modifying the general causes. These are principally the excessively difficult and risky conditions imposed on savings, the scant mobility of capital, products and workers, the value inconstancy of currencies and the artificial subdivision of the single world economy into so many different and rival national economic policies.
To the ingenious magnanimity of social security plans there corresponds, however, their very high social cost, generally disproportionate to the results that can be obtained from them, on account of which they prove prohibitive in the poorest countries that would most need them. The manifestations of crisis and disorientation therefore continued to occur through the undisturbed action of the primary causes, and onto them is grafted, making them more serious, a dangerous moral subversion arising from the conviction that social security is a primordial and general right of all in relation to the States, and that individuals and enterprises can demand guarantees and well-being from the State without any effective contribution of intelligence, work and loyalty on their part.
From the point of view of economic technique aimed at full employment, there exists a gap between Beveridge and Keynes: the former suggests that the State intervene directly to fill the difference between savings and investments, socializing consumption, while the latter invites the State to a policy of low interest in private financing, and to contribute to it through taxes, measured inflationary maneuvers and the gradual socialization of production. Both systems limit and mortify freedom of initiative, that is, the true and irreplaceable mainspring of productive activity: whence they succeed in obtaining a seemingly more orderly production, but generally inferior in quality and yield. Savings too remain mortified, the basis and soul of economic life, replaced by an unwelcome taxation. The policy of full employment appears, however, so far, the only effective diversion in the polemic between economic freedom and communism: but to respond completely to practical needs, as well as to charity, justice and reasonableness, it should rest on solutions of applied economics relating to savings, credit and exchange, universally valid and universally acceptable outside and above every politics.
III. THE ECONOMIC COUNCIL OF THE U.N. - The U.N. deals with social security through one of its bodies: the Economic Council, made up of 18 members elected for three years for the purpose of providing for international economic stability and for humanitarian and welfare initiatives: noble aims, which however do not aspire to solve essential problems. They expect nothing, in fact, from the technical progress of applied economics, nor do they hint at removing value and economic meaning from the rigid political boundaries of territorial sovereignties. A more marked attempt along this path is found in the Schuman Plan, which represents a victory of the federalist current in the European Union (v.), characterized by the progressive reduction of national sovereignties.
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Mario Baronci