It might have come from Karl Marx, who had a poor opinion of Russia and the premature implementation of socialism in an underdeveloped nation.
‘It might have come from Karl Marx, who had a poor opinion of Russia and the premature implementation of socialism in an underdeveloped nation.’
This statement by Marx is totally wrong.
History proved that socialism might be a blessing for primitive societìes, but it is an absolute disaster for any developed nation.
For example, every somehow functional nation in the Middle East or North Africa with the exception of Israel (which is leftist to boot but calling it socialist at this point is still an exaggeration) is or was socialist.
On the other hand, in East Asia and the West socialist societies are the worst performers.
There are numerous understandable reasons to it.
The fact is that nanny state is not necessarily a bad evil thing and it is a question of human development. At some stage it might be productive, when run by somehow enlightened class over a mass of savages, but a government like than is prone to corruption for another obvious reason and at certain level of human development its cons starts to outweight any pros by large margin.
The problem is at that time the system is heavily entrenched into society and big government don’t want to give up because it ends benefits of a ruling class. Not to mention is creates hordes of dependants who would fight for this system to the end or at the very least would smear and laugh at any dissent. It would actually make a habit for mainstream society to smear any decent, which would further expand into non-political (primarily economic) issues. It is a great danger in an economy which is not already good at rewarding the best performers. They would effectively vanish as a class when they not only don’t have any material incentive to work harder but also ridiculed by their lazy underperforming comrades. At that point this system would be a burden for society, limiting it further development. You could see it in USSR where the system came to such a crisis in 1930s which was resolved by Great Terror and then WWII with German invasion and related loss of life and infrastructure has diminished the problem, kicking the society back to the level of 19th century.
Another time the society reached the level at which socialism become a liability was mid1970s and it began to rot and exploded in 1991.
You can see similar processes in Cuba and North Korea these days.