ABSTRACT
It has almost become a cliché that the United States has some of the developed world’s most expansive and entrenched political freedoms, particularly in the realm of civil liberties and civil rights, yet has a social welfare system that is one of the developed world’s least well established-one that is even considered miserly by no small number of critics. As with most clichés, this is a point that can easily be overstated. In fact, political freedoms found in most of the developed world are on par with those in the United States, although national customs and constitutional practices vary from country to country. And while the U.S. social safety network does contain some significant gaps, modern American society is hardly the dog-eat-dog, Darwinian struggle portrayed by some detractors on the political left. In fact, the combined efforts of national, state, and local governments, along with an active charitable sector, have led to the provision of substantial, if incomplete, social services to the vast majority of citizens in the United States. At the same time, no country, however well developed its social welfare system, is completely immune from poverty and inequality.
