Are government welfare programs simply theft under the window-dressing of a gentler-sounding name?
Edgar K. Browning has a new book out titled, "Stealing from Each Other." Its subtitle is: "How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit." Economist Walter E. Williams has a good column about it today at Townhall:
The rise of equalitarian ideology has driven Americans to steal from one another. Browning explains that certain kinds of equality have been a cherished value in America. Equality under the law and, within reason, equality of opportunity is consistent with a free society. Equality of results is an anathema to a free society and within it lie the seeds of tyranny.
Exactly. A person is not free if they are not free to fail. The Bible says that God gave us free will to choose whether or not to believe in Him, in other words, He left us free to fail. It's really a very old, well-tested concept, and at one time (before there was a conservative movement, as such) it was one of the pillars of mainstream conservative ideology. We have accepted defeat on the issue, but that doesn't mean we need not recognize that where we are today is wrong, or that we don't need to be constantly alert to opportunities that exist to scale back the welfare state.
Nearly as importantly, it simply doesn't work.
Much of the justification for the welfare state is to reduce income inequality by making income transfers to the poor. Browning provides some statistics that might help us to evaluate the sincerity and truthfulness of this claim. In 2005, total federal, state and local government expenditures on 85 welfare programs were $620 billion. That's larger than national defense ($495 billion) or public education ($472 billion). The 2005 official poverty count was 37 million persons. That means welfare expenditures per poor person were $16,750, or $67,000 for a poor family of four...
The obvious answer is poor people are not receiving all the money being spent in their name. Non-poor people are getting the bulk of it.
So we are spending enough money on the poor to make every poor person middle to upper-middle class. It reminds me of something Ronald Reagan said in his great "Time for Choosing" speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964, a speech that didn't deliver the presidency to Goldwater, but would lead to Reagan's own presidency 16 years later.
Reagan: But now we are told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than $3,000 a year. Welfare spending is 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We are spending $45 billion on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you will find that if we divided the $45 billion up equally among those 9 million poor families, we would be able to give each family $4,600 a year, and this added to their present income should eliminate poverty! Direct aid to the poor, however, is running only about $600 per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.
The real purpose of welfare programs, like nearly all government programs, is to provide jobs for government employees. As noted by Reagan and by Browning, we have been spending enough to end need in this country. But ending need in this country is not a desirable goal. Need is valuable. If I didn't need to eat, I would never work.
Instead, if we are to have government welfare programs at all, the one and only goal of any welfare program should be to end the need of people who are genuinely unable to fulfill their needs on their own.
So what's Browning's solution? First, he reminds us of the biblical admonition "Thou shalt not steal." Government income redistribution programs produce the same result as theft. In fact, that's what a thief does; he redistributes income. The difference between government and thievery is mostly a matter of legality. Browning's solution is captured in the title of his last chapter, "Just Say No," where he proposes, "The federal government shall not adopt any policies that transfer income (resources) from some Americans to other Americans." He agrees with James Madison, the father of our Constitution, who said, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
Taxes to pay for the common needs of the citizenry are fine. Nobody who matters has a real problem with these. But putting a gun in my ribs and demanding that I pay for Paul's failure to work (or threatening me with imprisonment if I refuse to pay for Paul's failure to work) is not taxation as originally considered in this country. It is outright theft.
Do you agree or disagree? Oh, and check out Browning's book, I'm ordering mine today.
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