“Can you imagine my shock when I went into a welfare department and said, 'Do you mean to tell me that a woman can come in here every nine months and begin to get checks for another illegitimate child?' The welfare man said, 'Oh, no, Mrs. Newman, she has to claim a different man as father every time or else she doesn’t get the money.'"
—Patty Newman
The Dangerous Samaritans:
How Our Poverty Programs Injured the Poor
We think we are doing the right thing.
We think that if we pass laws to raise their wages and lower their rent, if we give generously to help support mothers without husbands and children without fathers, we can aid the poor in their flight from poverty and alleviate much of their distress while they are still in it.
We are wrong.
We forget that good intentions are not enough, and that virtually all government programs of any significant scope whatever carry with them great loads of unintended consequences. We forget that aiming is not hitting, and that meaning well is not necessarily doing well.
I. Minimum Wage Laws
First, we think that if we pass laws mandating higher wages for the lowest paid workers, we can increase their income and thereby aid the industrious poor in their escape from poverty. We forget that the lowest paid workers are normally those with the least skill and the least experience, and that, in the marketplace, they are the least desirable of all workers. By artificially elevating their wages, we make them even more undesirable, thus making it increasingly unlikely they can ever get or keep a job. This happens because we forget that a wage is not merely a selling price for a worker, it is purchase price for an employer. We pass laws preventing the least desirable workers from selling their services at a price their prospective employers, and ultimately the consumer, can afford to pay.
If you have little or no skill and experience, and yet the government requires you to sell your services at an artificially elevated price, you will not find anyone to purchase those services because, in order to pay for your overpriced services, your employer must raise his own selling price, which means that he is increasingly likely to go out of business and that all his current employees, who are more skilled than you, more experienced than you, and more worth the money he pays them, lose their jobs because those companies wise enough not to hire you at the legally mandated price can produce the same product your company produces, but at a lower cost both to themselves and to their customers. We forget that all workers work not merely for their employer, but also for the consumer, and that consumers wisely try to make the most of their money. Your product, because of its burgeoning cost of production, remains on the shelf or in the warehouse. In short, because of our desire to be moral and compassionate people, we pass laws requiring employers to pay higher wages to their least desirable workers while, as good stewards of the resources God has given us, we chose not to buy the over-priced products of those who do as the law demands, thereby putting them out of business, which creates more unemployed workers and more poor, whom we then foolishly try to help with minimum wage laws.
Perhaps the point can be made more graphically at the corporate level. Imagine that, in an effort to aid portions of our lagging auto industry, we decided to prop up the profits of our weakest car maker by passing a law that put a minimum price of $25,000 on each vehicle it sold, thus dramatically increasing the profits that company enjoyed from every sale. But, despite our good intentions, indeed because of our good intentions, that auto maker soon goes out of business because, no matter how much American consumers might want to “buy American,” very few can or will pay that much money for cars comparable to those available elsewhere at half the legally mandated price. The same principle holds true when that which is being sold is not a car but an unskilled employee’s overpriced labor. When minimum wages laws are in effect, the choice is often not between the legally mandated wage and some other wage, but between the legally mandated wage and no wage at all. Tragically, the latter option becomes increasingly more attractive and increasingly more common.
Furthermore, when you force an employer to raise the wages of his lowest workers, you force him to raise the wages of all the employees above them, who want to keep their wages in line with the newly established minimum. Thus, the price of labor increases at every level all the way up the organization, thus endangering the entire enterprise and all those associated with it.
To such harmful, but well intentioned, legislative conniving, no thinking Christian ought to consent. If you want to make the marketplace more moral, or if you want to be an agent of effective compassion, minimum wage laws are not the answer.
Instead, as economist Charles Van Eaton has compellingly argued, we ought to encourage more entrepreneurship like that of marketplace giants Ray Kroc and Dave Thomas, of McDonald's and Wendy's fame respectively. Far more than any government program ever has or could, Kroc and Thomas have aided the cause of the poor, whether one considers the poor as consumers or as workers.
Kroc and Thomas aided the poor as consumers by providing low income workers with inexpensive ways to treat their hard working spouses and their underprivileged children to enjoyable meals outside the home, a privilege reserved largely for the prosperous before the advent of fast food restaurants. Even now, decades after the inception of McDonald's, children twitter with excitement at the prospect of a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke, much like their mothers, who are spared the drudgery of cooking yet another meal and cleaning yet another load of dirty dishes. The poor man can now do for his family something previously reserved only for the wealthy.
Kroc and Thomas aided the poor as workers by providing them with the all-important entry level jobs by which unskilled or inexperienced workers learn critical marketplace lessons, such as the importance of appearance, punctuality, deference, teamwork, and dependability. These entry level jobs also help them to acquire management and public relations skills, as well as to obtain the personal references and endorsements necessary to obtain better jobs with other employers in the future. And along the way they earned a modest wage to boot.
Kroc and Thomas did more to aid the poor than does government because Kroc and Thomas understood that you cannot climb the ladder of success without first getting on the ladder. Kroc and Thomas invited the poor to step onto the first rung and to begin climbing. Untold thousands of people prospered in precisely this way, all without spending even one tax dollar. Quite the opposite: These novice workers themselves, as they rose from poverty, actually paid into public coffers. Do not forget that nearly one-eighth (12%) of the entire American work force has worked for Kroc or Thomas at one time or another. If you add into the equation those who worked for Burger King, Taco Bell and Arby's, the number goes even higher. Because of people like Kroc and Thomas, great numbers of minority poor became wealthy franchisees, many even owning large numbers of franchises, which provided entry level jobs for many more minority workers, thousands of whom gained access to management jobs both inside and outside their corporations, jobs that otherwise would have remained perpetually unattainable. In other words, while food service jobs are not a career, they can be the beginnings of one, as has been proven millions of times over.
II. Housing Laws
Second, we think that if we pass laws holding down the costs of urban housing, we can aid the poor by making many more thousands of inexpensive apartments available to them than before, and perhaps diminish homelessness in the process. We forget that a purchase price for a renter is a selling price for a landlord. The more attractive a price is for the one, the less attractive it is for the other. When landlords are forced to reduce their rents in the face of burgeoning tax and maintenance costs, those landlords wisely decide to allocate their very substantial investments in more lucrative ways.
For example, when rent-control ceilings make it unprofitable for landlords to rent their apartments, they often sell those apartments as condominiums, and thus escape real estate taxes and the high cost of urban upkeep (not to mention make enough money to send junior and his sister to a better college than they otherwise could have attended). Because the supply of condominiums then increases, their selling price tends to go down, which aids wealthy urban dwellers, the only ones who can afford to purchase condominiums. Meanwhile, the price of the apartments still remaining on the market now rises because their supply has shrunk. Thus, by trying to control rent in order to aid the poor, we actually aid the wealthy by driving down the price of their housing, and we injure those in poverty by decreasing the number of apartments available for them to rent at any price, driving more of them into the street
In order to prevent this dire consequence, we occasionally pass laws prohibiting landlords from taking recourse to condominium conversion (and also unintentionally preventing the landlord's children from getting a better college education and from becoming as productive as possible in the future). This legislative ban on condominium conversion proves predictably counter-productive because it often means (1) that landlords seek additional payments under the table from their renters, thus making life more difficult for the poor, who can scarcely afford the extra cost; (2) that landlords defer needed maintenance on their decaying buildings, again making life more difficult for the poor (Always remember that the condition of an apartment eventually matches its price); and (3) that landlords get out of the housing business altogether, tear down their apartments and build parking lots — low maintenance, high yield investments that serve only those wealthy enough to afford the high cost of owning, operating, and insuring an automobile in an urban setting.
Never forget that, human nature being what it is, people respond to incentives. Therefore, rather than passing rent control laws in order to aid our poorer neighbors, we ought to give significantly reduced public utility rates and impressive tax breaks to those who create, or who maintain, urban rental housing, thus making such housing more plentiful, more affordable and more comfortable. In short, if we do anything at all by means of the government, we should do all we can to promote the supply side of the supply and demand equation. The greater the incentives for property owners, the better it is for landlords. The better it is for landlords, the greater the supply of apartments. The greater the supply of apartments, the lower the price. The lower the price, the better it is for the poor. Furthermore, the subsequent increase in urban rental units not only results in lower rental prices for renters, it also provides more jobs for those who construct apartment buildings, as well as for those who service them or who maintain them.
To that sort of plan, a conscientious Christian might more readily consent, though such plans are not without their untoward effects.
III. Welfare Programs
Third, we think that by transferring money as generously as we can afford to the mothers of illegitimate children, we soften the pains of youngsters without fathers and of mothers without husbands. Not so. We forget what insurance companies often call “moral hazard,” which is insuring against a disaster in such a way as actually to cause the misfortune in question. That is, insurance companies know that because people respond to incentives, if an insurance policy pays off too handsomely, calamity occurs. For example, if the fire insurance policy on a sagging business pays more money to the owner of that business than the owner can get from operating it, that business is likely to burn. Fire insurance can cause fires. The temptation seems sometimes too great to resist. Likewise, if a life insurance policy pays off so lucratively that the insured’s beneficiaries are better off if the insured is dead, death sometimes results. If medical insurance covers too great a portion of medical expenses, people tend to go for treatment of illnesses that are hardly illnesses at all, thus tying up doctors, clinics, hospitals and pharmacies with cases that too often are trivial. In other words, when you reach the point of moral hazard, fire insurance causes fires, life insurance causes death, and medical insurance causes illness. Not surprisingly, insurance companies try hard always to avoid the moral hazard inherent in insurance. Those insurance companies learned that the threshold of moral hazard is reached very quickly.
We did not.
In our rush to do well for households without a male bread-winner, we forget that welfare is poverty insurance and, as result, we actually help cause the problem we are intending to alleviate. As the epigraph from Patty Newman that heads this essay indicates, by making illegitimate children a credential for increased financial support, we made certain more illegitimate children were born. Tragically, the more illegitimate children a woman has, the more deeply she becomes mired in poverty, and the less likely it becomes that she can ever extricate herself from it, despite the money she is given. As is all too clear, poverty circles around single parent homes, especially when the single parent is a woman.
Put differently, you get what you pay for. Because single motherhood is what we decided to pay for with our tax dollars, more single mothers is what we get. In the words of Robert Rector, this is an incentive program from Hell. As long as we pay the poor to continue doing the very things that helped make them poor in the first place, poor they shall remain. In the last eleven years in America, more than 80% of the children born in the urban black underclass were born out of wedlock and without an adult male to accept any financial responsibility for them. Of course, rising illegitimacy is neither a distinctively black nor a distinctively American problem. Sweden, for example, which subsidizes its unwed mothers even more generously than we do, has the highest rate of illegitimacy in the world.
Here is the point: When you tax something, you get less of it; when you subsidize it, you get more. We are, in fact, subsidizing immoral behavior. As a result, immoral behavior flourishes all around us. But those who practice it do not. This is no way to bring morality to the marketplace.
Looked at from another angle, our efforts to aid single mothers and their children made low income husbands extraneous, thus driving them from the home. The average total relief package for a single woman with three children is more than $19,000 — largely tax free. By comparison, a traditional family of four with a higher income, say $23,000, has only about $17,800 left after taxes. Poor women might be poor, but they are not stupid. Neither are poor young men, who quickly realize that by their own efforts and means they are unable to provide as well for their children as does their rich Uncle Sam in Washington. Uncle Sam is exceedingly tough competition for any poor working man who wants to have a wife and family of his own. By means of our so-called compassion and generosity, we sent the signal to millions of young women, young women eager to get out of their parents’ home and out of their parents’ control, that poor men are most useful to poor women as procreators, not as providers. That signal was clearly and widely received.
To poor young men, that same signal had a different, but equally devastating, effect because it severed the actions of poor young men from those actions’ attendant consequences. We taught poor young men that, if they wanted it, sex was a game they could play for free. No longer was there heavy pressure upon them to face up to the many unfortunate consequences of sex outside marriage. No longer did young men feel compelled to work long hours at difficult jobs in order to provide food, clothing, and shelter for the new lives they were creating, or for the financially dependent young women who helped create them. That tab, those young men quickly learned, will be picked up by the government. With no compelling need to channel time and energy into acquiring useful skills and into applying those skills profitably in the marketplace, increasing numbers of poor young men simply took to the streets, where life got boring and then got worse, much worse. Without work there is no economic prosperity, and without incentives there is no work. As a result, too many young women have decided not to marry the father of their children. They marry welfare instead.
In our misguided efforts to be good Samaritans, to help those lying in the ditch of poverty, we forget that whatever undermines traditional family values, traditional family roles, and traditional family ties undermines society itself. To such moral and social degeneration, no Christian ought ever to subscribe.
IV. False Charity
Fourth, by giving money to the poor, we think we are simply aiding and comforting the unfortunate in their time of difficulty. We forget that giving good gifts is an exceedingly difficult endeavor and that poverty is not always itself the problem; it is often the symptom of another prior problem. That is, if poverty (the lack of money) really were what ails the poor, supplying vast amounts of money would surely alleviate it. But after thirty years of Great Society-like welfare programs, programs that transferred more than four trillion — yes, trillion — dollars1 to the poor, poverty is still winning the war we wage against it.
Please get the point: In the last thirty years, we gave a million dollars to America's poor more than four million times, and all the while poverty got worse because throwing money at the poor does not solve their problem. Indeed, if all the money earmarked for poverty relief in this year's federal budget alone were given directly to the poor, we would have enough money to raise every man, woman and child in America above the poverty line and have cool $60 billion surplus left over to celebrate our victory. Poverty is not primarily a lack of money; it is a lack of something else. The poor are defined not so much by their poverty as by their behavior, from which their poverty springs, and by their beliefs, from which their behavior springs. They are prisoners in "mind-forg'd manacles."
While we are throwing record amounts of money at the poverty problem, we forget that of the many reasons why people are poor, only a few of those reasons lie truly outside their own control or require external remedy. We failed to convince the poor that the surest way to get ahead in modern America is precisely the way people have done it for decades: Get a good education (which includes both a mastery of English and of computation); work harder than those above you; save your money; invest your money. Instead, we tell the poor that in order to get more money they need to demand it from government, not to earn it in the marketplace. We talk as if financial success were a public entitlement, not a private achievement, and as if the modern poor were somehow incapable of succeeding by using the same means countless other Americans used in the past.
We also tell the poor that they are poor because the wealthy oppress them. In other words, we teach the poor to blame their poverty on prejudice. In a perverse sort of way, of course, we are right about the connection between prejudice and poverty. Indeed, prejudice does lead to poverty, though not always in the way we expect or explain. We convince the poor that the prosperous prosper only at someone else’s expense and usually by deceit and because of greed. Not only are such insulting generalizations not true about the successful and are instances of bearing false witness against our neighbors, they are crippling to the poor. If a poor man believes that most successful people are exploitive thieves who squash other people into poverty for their own gain, that impoverished man will not likely climb the ladder of economic success. That impoverished man remains poor for two reasons: (1) He no longer respects either those above him or their achievement, which makes it far less likely that he will seek to emulate them; and (2) He becomes blind to the real path to prosperity — hard work, ingenuity, sacrifice, postponed gratification and diligence. We have convinced the poor that they are poor primarily because of reasons they cannot change and over which they have no control, which demoralizes them. We teach the poor to be prejudiced themselves — prejudiced against the prosperous. That prejudice proves morally and economically debilitating. We blame poverty on prejudice and then promote prejudice among the poor. In the wake of that false and crippling bias, too many of the poor simply give up. We forget not only that ideas have consequences, but that bad ideas have bad ones.
We also forget to tie our charity more securely to the sincere efforts of the recipient. We mistakenly decide to give aid to the poor rather than to the deserving and industrious poor, that is, to those who are poor through no fault of their own, or whose escape from poverty can never be produced by their own efforts. In doing so, we ignore St. Paul’s prudent scriptural principle: If a man will not work, he shall not eat (2 Thess. 3:10, NIV). We must remember that Christian love does not squander either its resources or itself in reckless disregard of our neighbor's character and actions. By obliterating the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor, we run contrary to the will and practice of God, who treats the undeserving poor as objects not of mercy but of wrath.
In other words, we forget that real love helps those who cannot help themselves. Real love refuses to subsidize sluggardliness or indolence by doing for others what they can and ought to do for themselves. Christian love operates upon the premise that the defeat of poverty is a joint effort, or common endeavor, between the haves and the have nots, not a unilateral thrust by the haves only. The recipients of Christian charity ought to be either diligent workers or else unable. The unwilling and the slothful must get nothing from their Christian neighbors but exhortation. To subsidize the undeserving poor is to do them great moral injury because it makes way for dependency and indolence, not prosperity. Christian love works to produce exactly the opposite results.
As long as we fail to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor, we teach others that poverty is an entitlement, a credential, and that the blessings of life and labor are had merely for the asking or for the demanding, regardless of one's efforts or merit. People who believe such perverse messages can never grow to be productive citizens. They are doomed to be mere wards of the state. They become kept animals, incapable of survival outside the welfare cage. But this fact is not news. Even studies as old as the Seattle/Denver Income Maintenance Experiment of the 1970s indicated that every dollar of welfare given to low income persons reduced their labor earnings by 80 cents. Writing checks does not fix poverty.
Our indiscriminate giving created a culture of dependence and demand on the part of the poor, one in which the connection between effort and prosperity was severed. By failing to distinguish the deserving poor from the undeserving, we told the economically disadvantaged that the diligent application of their private means to the alleviation of their personal distress is both unimportant and ineffective. This misconception leads the poor to believe that if they are ever to escape poverty it can only be by someone else’s doing. This message, coupled with the notion that the poor are poor because of the perverse schemes of the rich, leads the poor to conclude that they are not responsible either for their poverty or for their extrication from it. By sparing the poor the challenge of their own success, we help consign them to state-funded dependency. We lead them in a direction quite the opposite of that articulated in John Kennedy’s memorable challenge: “Ask not what your country can do for you.”
Thus, while paternalism prospers, the poor do not.
V. Political Dependency
Finally, not only does the current welfare state tempt its recipients and potential recipients with nearly irresistible perverse incentives, it seduces those outside it as well, especially those who seek to administer it and those who pay for it. In this regard, I cannot improve upon the words of German economist Wilhelm Röpke, who wrote,
To expand the welfare state is not only easy, but it is also one of the surest means for the demagogue to win votes and political influence, and it is for all of us the most ordinary temptation to gain...a reputation for generosity and kindness. The welfare state is the favorite playground of a cheap sort of moralism that only thoughtlessness shields from exposure... Cheap moralism is anything but moral."2
In other words, all too often our efforts are not only misguided, they are ways by which we can appear to be virtuous persons of compassion when we are really rather lazy do-gooders content to let the welfare bureaucrats in Washington or in the statehouse handle all that poverty unpleasantness for us. But at least we felt good about ourselves. Too frequently than perhaps we care to admit or can admit, our poverty programs are thinly veiled efforts to enhance our self-esteem and to assuage our consciences by means of state programs. To imagine that by such shallow and self-gratifying efforts we can eliminate human poverty is shameless hubris, not charity and grace.
On many fronts and in many ways, our poverty programs have failed to reduce poverty. What is worse, they sometimes injure the very persons they are designed to aid. Because we fail to incarnate our good intentions with effective, well-conceived public policy, because (in the words of Walter Williams) we fail to realize that truly compassionate public policy requires dispassionate analysis, and because we choose to think with our hearts instead of our brains, much of the blame is ours. If we think the outcomes of the marketplace are not up to our moral standards, we must never forget that Christian charity does not lead to the welfare state. The Kingdom of God and the Great Society lie in opposite directions.
VI. Reforming Welfare
We can help the poor, but we must do so as good, rather than dangerous, Samaritans. In that light, I make the following suggestions:
1. Put welfare programs in the hands of contributors, not recipients or bureaucrats.
Welfare recipients and the bureaucrats who profit from the enlargement of the welfare state have actually banded together to form lobbies on Capitol Hill, hectoring legislators to redistribute even greater shares of other people's money and to do so as if access to other people's money is their God-given right. Gone is the notion that welfare is a form of charity or that escape from poverty is primarily the responsibility of the poor themselves. Welfare is now viewed as an entitlement. But if the poor have a natural right to money earned by others, then charity, which is voluntary giving, becomes impossible.
Rather than assigning control of welfare payments to the poor or to the welfare bureaucracy, we ought to give increased discretion over charitable contributions to the donors themselves. This is done best by giving tax credits (not income deductions) for all documentable charity of, say, up to 40% of one's total tax bill. This has the effect of making government charity compete for our philanthropy dollars, which will tend to make government programs more effective, more efficient, and less expensive.
2. Redefine poverty.
Nearly 40% of those the US government defines as "poor" own their own homes -- homes that have more living space than that enjoyed by most middle class Europeans. More than 70% of those we call poor own their own cars, nearly 20% owning more than one. Almost 60% of the poor own two or more televisions. Indeed, almost the first thing former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said upon his arrival in the US was "How wealthy are your poor!" "Poor" ought to retain its earlier definition: the lack of food, shelter or clothing. Poverty programs ought to be geared toward those who lack those three things. And while we are at the task of redefining, we ought to remind ourselves that the definition of compassion is not increased control of private income by government.
3. Re-educate the politicians and the poor.
We must remind politicians that to promote the general welfare is not the same as promoting welfare generally. Politicians ought not to think in terms of dollars redistributed but in terms of morality and responsibility. They ought always to bear in mind that welfare payments can prove psychologically addictive both to those who receive them and to those who supply and administer them. Politicians must remember that including more and more people on the emotionally addictive dole makes Congress a band of political pushers, not political saints. Government paternalism produces as many welfare junkies as it does welfare successes. Helping people become dependent on government is not an act of kindness.
As for the poor, we must remind them that it is not a shame to be poor; it is a shame to be lazy and unproductive. Generations of American poor knew how to be something many of today's poor do not: how to be both poor and proud — proud of their modest but hard-won earnings, and proud of the natural human dignity that does not depend upon a bank account. Nor should the poor shun honest wages for honest work. Too many of today's poor are not proud, they are arrogant. They consider themselves too good to do the menial labor one must perform in order to begin climbing the ladder of success. Yet they are not too proud to take welfare, only to flip hamburgers. America's previous poor were not, which is why they are no longer poor.
4. No perfect solutions are possible.
Poverty cannot be eradicated; it can only be ameliorated. But at least we can keep it from getting much worse and prevent ourselves from making it so. We must not expend scarce resources trying to do what cannot be done. Futility and waste are the enemy of the poor, not their ally. The good news, however, is that much can be accomplished and that we do not need great legions of government bureaucrats to get it done.
5. Provide tax credits for companies that train and hire persons on welfare.
The only effective way to move off welfare rolls is to become economically self-sufficient. But economic self-sufficiency requires marketable skills, which are difficult to acquire. Any company that aids poor persons in their escape from welfare by hiring them and training them does both the welfare recipient and the taxpayers a great service. Such service ought to be promoted and rewarded. Thus, in order to set proper incentives before businessmen, we ought to lower the tax burden of companies that remove persons from welfare rolls, just as they have lowered ours.
6. Welfare reform is not a one-size-fits-all problem.
While some basic principles apply to welfare reform everywhere, welfare problems in modern America are not the same in all locations and at all times. The welfare problems of New York are not those of Tulsa, Toledo, or Tallahassee; and the welfare problems of 1964 are not necessarily those of 1994. Welfare reform proposals, therefore, ought to be situation specific and time specific, which means that most welfare reform ought to be generated locally, not from Washington. The big boys in Congress cannot address your problems as well as you can. Don't let them try.
7. Abundance can be wrenched from scarcity only by ingenuity and hard work.
In a world where not every need or every desire can be met, where resources must be allocated in light of difficult and inescapable trade offs, the important question is not how poverty is gotten, but how wealth is achieved. It is easy to become poor and to stay that way. But to become prosperous, you must learn to supply your neighbors wants and needs. Poor persons who learn that skill do not stay poor.
8. Reforming welfare does not mean that selfish people have won the debate.
It means that generous people have stopped kidding themselves.
When it works as it ought, welfare is either help for those who cannot help themselves, or else a stop on the way to personal independence and self-support. When welfare does not work as it ought, it is a crippling moral seduction that entices its recipients into a dependency than enslaves genenration after generation.
If you are able-bodied and do not have children under the age of day-care, (say, about 2 or 3 years of age) you either must work or else get training for work. If you do not, you get no assistance. This policy, or one very much like it, ought to inform and shape every effort at poverty relief, whether public or private.
What government can do that private agencies do not: make certain that parents pay their child-rearing bills, under threat of jail, or fine, or both.
Relief must not be given without taking recourse first to those who are morally and legaslly responsible: parents, husbands, wives, etc.
Because giving without regard for the the spiritual and moral conswequences of such giving is not help but injury, both intelligent giving and inteligent withholding are proper forms of charity. We must give so as to help people escape poverty, not remain in it.
The insulting and debilitating message sent by the modern welfare state: you cannot escape poverty without our help, without our money.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hall, David. (Ed.) Welfare Reformed (Franklin: Legacy, 1994).
Murray, Charles. “Does Welfare Bring More Babies?” The Public Interest 115 (1994): 17-30.
Olasky, Marvin. “The New Welfare Debate: How to Practice Effective Compassion,” Imprimis 24 (1995): 1-5.
ENDNOTES
1 In constant 1990 dollars.
2 Wilhelm Röpke, Against the Tide (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1969), 204, 206.
"Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's money and avoiding the sting?... What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves?"
—C. S. Lewis
date modified:
10 July 06