The Unalloyed Evil Of The Welfare State.

Everyone is aware of the radical change in America's attitude toward public assistance and government action in supposed defense of the welfare of Americans.

The vast array of government programs presented to any citizen who is not perfectly comfortable is mind numbing. They claim to provide everything! Housing, food, cell phones (!), internet access, medical care, child care, help with utility bills, transportation, discounts on taxes, higher education, and on and on. Whether those innumerable government programs actually provide those pie-in-the-sky promises is a different question, but we all know that if they do, it comes at an obscene and inefficient cost. And it is becoming increasingly obvious that the many billions of dollars spent each year are often stolen!

They programs are shoved at us every day, from signs at the market touting EBT benefits, to signs on highways with government phone numbers to call for aid, to emergency room medical coordinators frantic to find a government program to pay their exorbitant bills.

The list of who to blame is long, but the heavy hitters are FDR, LBJ, Nixon (Yup!), Obama, and Biden. They conspired to make the default attitude of Americans that of a supplicant, rather than a citizen with rights and responsibilities.

And it worked!

What the Welfare State Unleashed

Indeed, one of the striking features of early America is not that assistance was unavailable, but that many people who qualified for relief were reluctant to seek it. Contemporary accounts from several states—including New Jersey—describe respectable men and women enduring extraordinary hardship before accepting public charity. To modern ears, such reluctance may seem irrational. To them, it was a matter of preserving self-respect.

That moral instinct—that accepting public assistance should be exceptional rather than ordinary—formed an essential part of the American understanding of citizenship until the 20th century.

The first cracks in that understanding appeared during the Progressive Era and deepened during the New Deal. Faced with industrialization, urban poverty, and the Great Depression, Americans increasingly looked to government to perform functions that earlier generations had entrusted to institutions outside of the government. Much of that expansion responded to genuine crises, and programs such as Social Security reflected the extraordinary circumstances of their time.

Even so, the nation’s underlying philosophy was beginning to change. Government was no longer viewed simply as a safety net for those unable to care for themselves; it increasingly became expected to solve all social and economic problems. The shift was gradual and often justified by necessity. But it subtly weakened the older assumption that public assistance should remain exceptional, temporary, and closely tied to preserving personal independence.

But another consequence of this plunge into the welfare state and the welfare psyche is that even people who have no need for government assistance in its many forms have been tarnished by it.

We see destitute people overwhelming our cities, and we recoil. We turn away from those in need. And that is a rational response to people who have lost their sense of morality and shame and pride and self-respect. We have come to expect that the government will take care of it, even though we know that government is incapable of that task, and we have the data to prove it! But government has placed obstacles in the way of regular Americans to help their less-well-off neighbors. Churches must jump through hoops to provide a hungry man a hot meal. Charitable organizations are buried under oceans of paperwork and, sadly, some have become vehicles for the self-aggrandizement of their sponsors. Just look at the Clinton's "charity" for evidence of that.

Have we lost all sense of goodness and charity? No, of course not. We are still the most generous people on earth, but the taint of government has injured even that!

posted by CBD at 12:00 PM

| Access Comments