The fundamental principle of public intervention changed with the new rights. Before the power intervened in order to prevent harm to individuals. Then he went on to intervene to ensure their welfare. A relevant reason for limiting power disappeared because what is the point of limiting a State that seeks the welfare of the people and that is also a democratic State, elected and controlled by the people?
I am not suggesting that in classic rights the State is unnecessary, although there is an extreme libertarian discourse, more anarchist than libertarian, which supports it. The classic rights also demand a State that obtains the precise funds to guarantee them: a libertarian world needs judges, policemen and soldiers. The difference between the two kinds of rights is not that some are free and the other onerous, but that they give the State an extremely different dynamic, controlled in one case, expansive in the other.
Even the basic texts of the Rule of Law, the constitutions put an increasing emphasis on the new rights, without the legislators have perceived the political illegality embodied in the insoluble contradiction of trying to limit the power while being asked to satisfy each time more rights of citizens, which is impossible without violating other rights, especially the right to the fruit of one's work.
Another effect of the new situation refers to the State itself, which initially was conceived as divided into three independent powers of similar relevance. This is no longer the case, and its consequences can hardly be seen. Traditionally, the legislature instructed the executive on what to do and also how to do it. The new constitutional frameworks, which burden the State with all kinds of duties, do not tell you how to comply with them. To this is added that the activities of the State are now of such complexity that the legislator is gradually constrained to recognize that in order for the executive to be able to comply with what is required of him, it is necessary to grant increasing doses of authority and discretion. It is the seed of the end of the division of powers and the classic "checks and balances". The executive increased its importance considerably, the legislature lost prestige and became a replica of the first, while the judicial remained in the background until recently, when in some countries like Venezuela, it acquired a "stellar" role that has caused not a little restlessness.
Democracy becomes something fundamentally new, because it is no longer limited to being a mechanism of bloodless substitution of rulers with popular participation but a pressure on the power to redistribute incomes in order to achieve "social justice", which is interpreted as suppression of inequalities. Equality and justice have stopped referring to rules to refer to results. Given the insurmountable human inequality, and the fact that there is virtually no activity from which they can not derive consequences that eventually harm some person, the political field of action now has no borders. Democracy goes from being a limit to power to being a stimulus for its intervention and for an ever-growing politicization. Thus, when it comes to democratizing this or that thing, it is never intended to pass to the free market competition but at the hands of the authorities.
Paradoxically, democracy means choosing, but also being able to choose each one, not voting for a third party so that it is exclusively the one that chooses without limits, unless it is created in the perfect transmutation of society into politics. In this case, the very notion of representative democracy loses its meaning and an assembly and tribal notion of Parliament is established, a specular vision: Parliament no longer represents the people but is the people or reflects it as a mirror. The public interest is directly identified with the political interest and imposes the idea that it can not be otherwise if the power is and does what society wants it to be and do. The model of the Rule of Law, by which freedoms and human rights require the abstention of power, disappears. Now the rights are only fulfilled through a very active political intervention, fully justified because the power now is "society".
From what has been said up to this point, it is enough to affirm that even though his action was impeccable and his officials and administrators were angels, the modern democratic welfare state will always end up being big and lacking in restraints.