Interesting quote from Sovereign Individual :

“But wait. You may be saying that in most jurisdictions there are many more voters than there are persons on the government payroll. How could it be possible for employees to dominate under such conditions? The welfare state emerged to answer exactly this quandary. Since there were not otherwise enough employees to create a working majority, increasing numbers of voters were effectively put on the payroll to receive transfer payments of all kinds. In effect, the recipients of transfer payments and subsidies became pseudo employees of government who were able to dispense with the bother of reporting every day to work. It was a result dictated by the megapolitical logic of the industrial age.”

This was understood in 1997