Wealth & Money Quote by Jacques Delors

Delors is trying to drag the welfare-state argument out of the accountant's spreadsheet and back into moral psychology. He concedes the technocratic obsession of modern politics - "how we finance" - then flips the frame: the deeper risk isn't insolvency but entitlement without reciprocity. The key move is his suspicion of the word "inalienable", a term usually reserved for rights so fundamental they sit beyond politics. Attach that to welfare "no matter what happens to the world" and he’s diagnosing a kind of moral inflation: a claim that expands even when circumstances contract.

The subtext is very Delors-era Europe: a postwar social compact built on steady growth colliding with demographic aging, deindustrialization, and later the pressures of globalization. In that setting, welfare can either read as solidarity (we insure one another against misfortune) or as an untouchable personal asset. Delors is warning that the second interpretation quietly hollows out the first. If benefits are imagined as unconditional property, the language of equity gets hijacked: equity becomes getting your share, not sustaining a system that requires contribution, restraint, and sometimes reform.

His most provocative line is the last one. "You can't ask anything of people" isn’t a budgetary complaint; it’s a civic one. A welfare state that cannot demand duties - to work when possible, to pay taxes, to accept tradeoffs - stops being a shared project and becomes a vending machine. Delors is defending welfare by insisting it must remain a relationship, not a receipt.