LONGECITY

As the welfare state transfers power from the individual to the state, so it also saps the power of civil society. Each new task taken on by government means less responsibility, less purpose, for the neighborhood, the community, and the church.

The growth of the welfare state takes responsibility away from individuals and communities, removing an important source of satisfaction from our lives.

Welfare actually harms the people it was intended to help by creating dependency, illegitimacy, and long-term poverty.

Now, why, in a nation with the wealth of the United States, would there not be enough people to attend naturally and fully to the functions of the community?

Communities exist because they have a reason to exist, some core of functions around which the affiliations that constitute a vital community can form and grow. When the government takes away a core function, it depletes not only the source of vitality pertaining to that particular function, but also the vitality of a much larger family of responses.

By hiring professional social workers to care for those most in need, it cuts off nourishment to secondary and tertiary behaviors that have nothing to do with formal social work. An illustration: In the logic of the social engineer, there is no causal connection between such apparently disparate events as the establishment of a welfare bureaucracy and the reduced likelihood (after a passage of some years) that, when someone dies, a neighbor will prepare a casserole for the bereaved family’s dinner. In the logic I am using, there is a causal connection, and one of great importance.

I am arguing ultimately from two premises, that the practice of a virtue has the characteristics of a habit and of a skill. People may be born with the capacity of being generous, but become generous only by practicing generosity. People have the capacity for honesty, but become honest only by practicing honesty.

The demise of communism has taken the luster off the idea of economic planning. Although social engineers still advance planning schemes, they never call them planning but come up with terms such as industrial policy, economic democracy, or competitiveness policy. These days the most important argument for interference with the free-market order is redistribution of income through the welfare state. Redistribution usually involves “a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.”

Here, the problem of the unworkable, unaffordable, and untouchable welfare state and the problem of workplace regimentation converge. In America’s long march to its distinctive brand of social democracy, there came into being something Marx could not have anticipated: a working class with proletarian status but middle class means. Now, the overwhelming majority of Americans, in their working-class capacity, consider themselves entitled to an ever-expanding range of social services, which in their middle-class capacity they pay for in taxes they find increasingly unreasonable.

It needs to be recognized that the quickest way out of poverty is a clear and resolute decision for the market, private enterprise, and individual initiative. As necessary first step, we must reject statism, collectivism, and populist demagogy.

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

Thomas Jefferson

The kind of government that is strong enough to give you everything you need is also strong enough to take away everything that you have.