Sozialpolitik

Sozialpolitik (German), literally, social politics. are the policies of political intervention launched by the German Chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, in 1881 in an attempt to compete with the German Social Democratic Party, the party of the Marxist socialists, for the political loyalty of the wage earners. While many of the features of this policy were modeled on British patterns, social security legislation was an institution never before tried. The German Sozialpolitik was the forerunner of welfare state policies in Europe and of the American New Deal inaugurated in 1933 by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The advocates of such policies deny the existence of economic law and fail to realize that such political interventions result in lower living standards for the very masses they seek to help by so-called "pro-labor" legislation.