Individual Claims to Social Benefits, I

It is a truism that the response of government to the manifold necessities of modern society has made the state today an organization providing services for the community. In particular, government is regarded as an agency to help alleviate economic disparity and maladjustment. This present development does not mean that the functions of regulation and protection, the traditional concomitants of the police state of the nineteenth century, have ceased to be important. On the contrary, they have increased in magnitude and importance as means of communication and as technical knowledge have increased. Thus the regulation and licensing of the practice of medicine, for example, assume greater importance as medical knowledge increases and as the health problems of the community grow. But the new emphasis of government is indeed on assistance and service to those in need of aid, such as the unemployed, the aged, and the blind.The new functions of government are in some ways only developments of the old, and the line between regulatory and service developments is not a division between absolutely watertight compartments. In general, a regulatory function is one in which government either directs by regulations of one sort or another the way in which private individuals shall conduct themselves, or else licenses them to carry on certain activities, as found in statutes forbidding industrial homework in certain industries and requiring licenses in others.