Welfare is thus seldom used by itself. Especially when one is connecting the concept of welfare to the concept of the state, the signifier implies a clear role for the state with regards to helping members of society to have a good life by,for example, the financing and delivery of services and income transfers. Still,the concept of the welfare state can have different connotations, ranging from a British perspective where it customarily refers to a society in which the government accepts the responsibility for ensuring citizens’ good welfare, to the US where welfare implies means-tested benefits (Deacon 2002). This last understanding is also the definition used in one of the classical textbooks about the welfare state (Barr 2003). For some, the connection of welfare and state has a negative connotation, as this quote indicates: “the Welfare State has grown and grown like Topsy, as it were—or more accurately, like a cancer sucking the life-blood out of the people” (Marsland 1996, xiii). Marsland also argues that
the welfare state is too expensive, “in any case it doesn’t work. However generously its resources, the Welfare State does not and cannot produce its intendedoutcomes” (Marsland 1996, 19).