"Wait a minute. I thought "positive freedoms" were those you could exercise because you're well-nourished, well-housed, and well- educated, and so have a lot more of a chance actually to do something than you would in the libertarian paradise where you're just left alone."
I don't know. Maybe we went to different pol sci classes. But when I was taught the positive freedoms *were* the "nourishing," "housing" and "educating", that would make the proletariat fit to exercise the negative freedoms that the bourgeoisie took for granted (that is voting, speaking, organising, freedom of conscience and so on). The basis of the theory is that if the working class are not fed and quartered, their political choices will be unstable, and (scandalously) might seek to address their material wants through the political process. The welfare state was created to remove the question of working class reproduction from political consideration. Pointedly, the material reproduction of the working class dictated by the welfare state meant rationing of food (up to 1955 in the uk) council housing (think projects) and military-style hospitals - better than starving, but not freedom so much as living as others thought you ought to live.
The basic model was the workhouse and the board school (created to stop the Spitalfields weavers from eductating their own children in Ricardian socialism).