Posted on 12/05/2017 5:22:21 PM PST by markomalley
Fighting poverty is a favorite pastime of government because politicians get to portray themselves as champions of the poor. However, the unfortunate few tend to be far fewer in number when aid is extended privately instead of through tax funded programs.
Coercion is used to acquire the revenue (taxes) to finance welfare programs. As evidenced by the commission it retains prior to redistributing this wealth, government bureaucracies are one of the beneficiaries of these programs, and thus highly incentivized to claim a perpetual need for the programs. I live in Canada, where the number of federal government welfare program employees increased by 43% between 2006 and 2012. Clearly, it serves the interests of politicians and bureaucrats to create (impose) a culture of dependency. As Murray Rothbard wrote in For a New Liberty:
Since welfare families are paid proportionately to the number of their children, the system provides an important subsidy for the production or more children. Furthermore, the people being induced to have more children are precisely those who can afford it least; the result can only be to perpetuate their dependence on welfare, and, in fact, to develop generations who are permanently dependent on the welfare dole.
Economist Thomas Sowell wrote:
The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.
The government exacerbates the problems it is supposedly trying to solve.
Drawing on the work of David Beito, historian Hildegard Hoeller describes the presence of decentralized systems of mutual aid:
Regardless of where they came from, the members of nearly all ethnic and national groups erected formidable networks of individual and collective self-help for protection. These social welfare systems fell into two broad categories: hierarchical and reciprocal relief.
While hierarchical relief was often bureaucratic, Beito notes, “reciprocal relief tended to be decentralized, spontaneous, and informal. The donors and recipients were likely to from the same or nearly the same walks of life. Today’s recipients could be tomorrow’s donor.”
In his book From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, Beito continues:
Reciprocal relief was far more prevalent than either governmental or private hierarchical relief. Its most basic expression was informal giving, the countless and unrecorded acts of kindness from neighbors, fellow employees, relatives, and friends . . .
. . . The self-help and informal neighborly arrangements created by the poor themselves dwarfed the efforts of formal social welfare agencies. In this regard Edward T. Devine, a prominent social worker, used an article in the “Survey” to warn his colleagues against the sin of self-importance. He reiterated that millions of poor people were able to survive and progress without recourse to organized charities and governmental aid: “We who are engaged in relief work . . . are apt to get very distorted impressions about the importance, in the social economy, of the funds which we are distributing or of the social schemes which we are promoting . . . If there were no resources in times of exceptional distress except the provision which people would voluntarily make on their own account and the informal neighborly help which people would give to one another . . . most of the misfortunes would still be provided for.”
Private charity was more effective than government welfare because private persons contributing their own money are highly incentivized to identify genuine needs. On the local level it is easy to monitor recipients to ensure they are making every effort to become independent. Indeed, long ago, much of the aid provided came from those who personally knew the recipients.
In contrast, centralized government bureaucracies are impersonal by nature. This does not mean government employees are uncaring and lack empathy. It means they deal with countless welfare recipients who they can’t possibly know personally, and perhaps are forbidden from doing so. Coupled with the fact that they are giving away someone else’s money, incentives for determining genuine need are very weak. Thus, the indolent know how to milk the modern public system, but were denied aid in the private system of the nineteenth century.
There is a big difference between those who are incapable of supporting themselves, and those who are capable but unwilling. If you fall into the latter group, you are undeserving of assistance — a concept a ten-year-old can understand. Yet, socialists are aghast at such a statement. It is not for us to assess personal character and habits, they say. When a person says they are in need, we must automatically open our wallets, but we must never judge (which, by the way, simply means to express an opinion). As William Gairdner unhappily noted in his book The Trouble With Canada . . . Still!, “Canada’s National Council of Welfare deplores any effort to distinguish between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor.”
Is Reform Possible?
Politicians say they can alleviate poverty, which they often blame on ‘greedy capitalists’ and ‘inequality’ — assertions which Ryan McMaken has disproven. Consistent with McMaken’s article, when markets are hampered by government intervention, poverty increases. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action:
It is highly probable that the funds of the charitable institutions would be sufficient in the capitalist countries if interventionism were not to sabotage the essential institutions of the market economy . . . The greater part of those assisted by charitable institutions are needy only because interventionism has made them so.
Can government welfare programs be reformed in order to match the superior incentives possessed by private individuals? No. The superior nature of private incentives derives from the fact that individuals are deploying their own resources — their own money. As such, this is impossible to duplicate within the coercive institutional structure of government.
Government welfare discourages productive work, encourages dependency, and places an enormous economic burden on the backs of resentful, hard-working taxpayers. As Gairdner wrote:
Like iron fillings drawn to magnets, the country divides into those who produce and want to protect what they have earned, and those who want to share by right (and so, by force) in what the former have produced. In this respect, the shift from the idea of a State set up to provide and protect equal opportunity, to one that is expected to provide equal outcomes, or results, has been decisive, and has resulted in what the insurance industry calls a “moral hazard.” George Gilder summed up the misguided policy effects as follows:
The moral hazards of current programs are clear. Unemployment compensation promotes unemployment. Aid for families with dependent children . . . makes more families dependent and fatherless. Disability insurance in all its multiple forms encourages the promotion of small ills into temporary disabilities and partial disabilities into total and permanent ones. Social security payments may discourage concern for the aged and dissolve the links between generations . . . All means-tested programs . . . promote the value of being “poor” (the credentials of poverty), and thus perpetuate poverty.
Many people with EBT cards refer to it as their pay check. It should be called their thank-you-very-much-taxpayer card.
All welfare should be cut off.
If they cant make it in US they cant make it anywhere.
Into camps like Japanese in WW2 .
Humane treatment in the camps for thek rest of their natural lives.
Off of our streets.
Mom was on it for a year and a half while going to nursing school in the 70s.
Pop had a heart attack and there were five kids.
She used to go shopping for food in the middle of the night because she was embarrassed.
Became a nurse and we lived a decent lower middle class life and 5 of us went on to college and paid a #### load more in taxes than the 18 months welfare.
Yours might be the most ignorant comment i’ve seen on here in a while. And that ain’t easy sometimes :)
You may be right. Lets just keep going the way we are.
Such American values / S
Hit a rough patch in life and off to the camps you go for life...
The Headline instantly brought back memories of this and similar issues during the Reagan Years.
It seems soo far removed now.
I’m afraid our country has long reached the tipping point.
God help US.
YES. Welfare is the business of churches and local civic organizations -— NOT government.
Government welfare is simply a way to buy votes -— always has been, always will be until we shut it down.
END ALL GOVERNMENT WELFARE PROGRAMS!!!
“Such American values / S
Hit a rough patch in life and off to the camps you go for life...”
Ive had a few. I remember losing 50 pounds during despair of lack of job. ...With wife and kids. I remember scouring grocery store parking lots for money. I remember being in the military reserve to serve country and make a few bucks in process. I don’t remember any welfare. I remember never giving up and endlessly trying to succeed. I finally did. There would be ways for people to work their way out of camps.I’m talking about the enormous dragging anchor of useless, forlorn, hopeless, dangerous leeches in our society.
Get government out of the retirement savings business, as well.
Thank you for posting this article. It is spot on and I would love to see more and more articles like this. Welfare by government rots our very souls.
There are far more proactive ways to get people off of welfare than looking out their interment camp gate....
Let’s put a “work will make you free” sign over the entrance.
Gingrich forced Clinton to do welfare reform and cut the welfare rolls in half.
Government should help us get our $500k nest egg and then disappear.
Well, even the best of us screw up sometimes, this was your time.
One of the sayings in the legal profession is that bad cases make bad law.
Your mother could have been helped by her family, friends, or congregation, or just toughed it out. Was it worth while to institute a vast bureaucracy to take take care of a case like yours, when the result is grave harm to a both the whole people and our government?
Look at the whole picture and you can a better make a better comment you did.
Here’s a better comment.
Go ### yourself you ignorant disgrace of a human being.
my mother did what she HAD to to survive.
Nobody had money in the family and what exactly does tough it out mean?!?!
not eat or have a roof.
What a d#### you are and you give conservatives a bad name.
If you were here, i’d knock you the #### out for insulting my mother.
Jim, feel free to cancel my account if you wand and think this post was out of line, just cancel the monthly donation with it.
It’s up to you.
Sandwhicheguy, you’re an ass :) And it’s better to keep one’s mouth shut and make people guess they’re a #### than open it and give solid proof.
Be thankful your mom was never in that position cause lord knows what she might have resorted to.
And read a bible you pompous sanctimonious piece of trash.
BTW, dont see you two on the 300 list.
Just another pair of bigmouth cheapskate ####s who think this board is a free magazine in the dentists’ office.
TOUGH IT OUT and donate SOMETHING.
dp,there are idiots everyplace,even here.
Your mother is to be commended and you should just ignore the “purists”.
Take a deep breath and have a cup of tea. :-)
Mears
“Gingrich forced Clinton to do welfare reform and cut the welfare rolls in half.”
And then Clinton claimed credit for it and claimed that he had personally balanced the budget and created an annual surplus which never existed in the real world.
There is nothing in the Constitution about a Welfare system. (NO. “Promote the General Welfare” does not count.)
ALL welfare should be handled at the local, then the state level. 50 (51?) labs to see what works and what does not, not the Federal government redistributing money to buy votes.
Trump has promised that all welfare recipients will be randomly tested for drugs.
Anyone caught dirty will not get welfare for a minimum of a year, and I think he intends to continue testing them during that ‘time out’.
I would bet that over 70% of welfare recipients are using illegal drugs. Maybe more.
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