Most rational men know well the injustice of welfare programs. Their proponents redistribute wealth – from the productive to the non-productive – and claim the moral high ground by saying that their goal is to stamp out poverty. Opponents often accept the altruist premise but argue that welfare programs harm the poor individuals they are intended to benefit; i.e., they hold that welfare is not immoral, only ineffective. It is now five years since the conservative’s influence resulted in Congress’ 1996 legislation reforming welfare. Enough time has passed to profitably raise several questions. What has been the result of welfare reform?  Have the reforms been adequate to solve the problems? If not, why have the conservatives been largely silent on this issue in recent years? Are there deeper philosophical principles, generally unidentified, that the welfare state violates, that necessitates the practical damage it causes? Above all, what would solve the welfare problem – and why?  

The backbone of the welfare system is Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The program originated during the New Deal era as a means of supporting  children of widows. In the 1950s and early 1960s it was amended – first to include an additional stipend for the mother or another caretaker adult, then to expand it to include a two-parent family in which the father was unemployed. In addition, during his Great Society initiative, President Johnson established Medicaid to provide for the health care of the poor, and expanded a small 1961 program into the Food Stamp program that we know today. Though LBJ’s programs were initiated in the mid-to-late-1960s, massive government welfare spending did not commence until the 1970s.

For example, Johnson started the current Food Stamp program in 1965 with 424,000 participants, which grew to 2.2 million by the time he left office in 1968. In the first two years of Nixon’s presidency, the number doubled; but between 1970 and 1972 it quintupled. By 1980, the number of people receiving Food Stamps was 21.1 million, fifty times the amount in 1965, ten times what it was at the end of Johnson’s administration. Further, using constant 1980 dollars, welfare spending grew by $30 billion during the five Johnson years, but by $80 billion between 1968 and 1973, an increase 2.7 times larger than under LBJ. The full truth is that, in principle, the United States became a welfare state under FDR in the 1930s, that LBJ increased the programs enormously in the late 1960s, and the massive spending of the past thirty years commenced in the early 1970s.¹  

Social scientist Charles Murray’s 1984 book, Losing Ground, was a landmark work in the welfare debate. Murray is one of the leading thinkers of the type referred to above, who do not challenge the moral premise of the welfare state. Rather, he argued based on hard economic facts that the enormous welfare spending of the 1970s had not helped the poor, that in fact might have harmed those it was intended to benefit, and that government welfare programs were incapable of attaining their compassionate goals.  Predictably, his book was savagely attacked by the Left. Murray examines the financial options open to a young poor couple in 1960. Prior to the massive government programs undertaken in LBJ’s “war on poverty,” marriage and minimum wage employment were financially superior alternatives to welfare. Relief payments were small, and even if a woman was pregnant or had a baby strict rules prevented her from supplementing her income by working. Further, if the woman had a boyfriend, they would be unable to live together because AFDC benefits were not granted if there was a man in the house.

But by 1970, much had changed. In 1960, there were three practical objections to receiving welfare: too little money, no way to supplement it and no chance for couples to live together. By 1970, all three impediments had been removed. If a woman was pregnant, her AFDC payments were now significantly higher, and she received Medicaid, as well. The law had been amended so that she could now add to her income by working if she chose. Further, by Supreme Court ruling, the presence of a man in the house could not be used as a reason to deny a woman benefits. As long as a couple was unmarried, a woman could receive benefits and the man was free to work when and if he chose. Many poor individuals have, and have always had, strong moral objections to going on welfare – but by 1970, the government had removed any financial ones. It had made welfare and illegitimacy a superior short-term financial alternative to marriage and minimum-wage employment.²

Because a disproportionate number of black Americans were poor in the late 1960s, and because the Civil Rights Movement of that era was an attempt to redress a century of racial injustices, the government’s war on poverty coalesced into a campaign heavily (though not exclusively) directed toward blacks. Further, because the Left has long argued that capitalism necessitates a permanently exploited underclass as a condition of creating wealth, many American intellectuals and politicians (then and now) construed blacks as such a victimized class, requiring governmental programs to redistribute wealth as acts of “social justice.” In 1980, some 19.7 million white Americans were living beneath the official poverty line, roughly 2.3 times the number of blacks.³  Many of them were also hurt by the welfare state. But because blacks were so heavily the target group of the Left, its effects have been strongest on them. As a consequence, the conditions of black Americans before and after 1970 form the best laboratory in which to examine the impact of welfare on recipients. 

Tragically, in the 1960s, few people noticed the pronounced upward trend for black Americans prior to the huge expansion of welfare spending.  By 1970, black Americans had made enormous strides in education and income. A fundamental cause was the Second Great Migration of rural blacks from the south to northern cities during World War Two. With millions of men away at war, factory jobs in the northern cities opened up. Blacks moved north, taking those jobs and receiving the higher wages they offered. Their children now attended northern schools, which were superior to the segregated schools of the south. The 1940s saw the start of a dramatic increase in the education levels of blacks. In terms of income, the results of the migration were stunning. In 1940, 87 percent of black families lived below the official poverty line. In 1960, the number was 47 percent. In 1970, it was 30 percent. This upward economic movement represents an enormous and far-too-rarely-mentioned achievement on the part of black Americans. Still, in 1970, blacks were disproportionately poor. Then came the welfare state.⁴ 

In order to understand the full impact of the welfare state, we must examine several related changes made in governmental policy in the 1960s. In northern public schools, where liberal ideas were most influential, treatment of underachieving and disruptive students changed. For several reasons, including Supreme Court rulings Gault v. Arizona (1967), Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969) and Goss v. Lopez (1975), public school officials were undermined in their ability to administer discipline. Administrators and faculty members were compelled to adopt a significantly more lenient attitude toward students who refused to study and/or who disrupted the study of others. Further, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the government initiated a less punitive approach toward underage urban criminals, committing far fewer to juvenile institutions and sealing or even expunging youthful criminal records. No matter the frequency or severity of the crime(s), by the time the youth reached his 18^th birthday it was if they had never been committed. This fact was, of course, well known to young criminals.⁵

The government’s post-1960s policies must be examined in their cumulative effect. The state made welfare a more lucrative short-term option than full-time minimum-wage employment. It made chronic illegitimacy a superior financial alternative to marriage and self-supporting family. It increasingly refused to discourage unruly behavior in school. By promoting even those who failed to learn, it undercut the motivation to study and get an education. By permitting disruptions and undermining motivation, it made learning as difficult as possible in the urban public schools. By decreasingly punishing youthful offenders, it encouraged crime. Governmental policies have encouraged indolence, illegitimacy, lack of family structure and supervision, disruptive school behavior, diminished education and crime.  

The effects have been predictable. The American historian, Clarence Carson, has referred to such paternalistic policies as “a war on the poor.”⁶ His assessment is accurate, and because American blacks were the government’s principal target, it is they who have borne the brunt of the assault. Consider the consequences regarding four major issues: marriage and two-parent families, labor force participation (LFP), upward economic mobility and crime.

During the Depression, the marriage rate for black Americans was higher than for whites, though blacks were considerably poorer. Through the 1940s and 1950s, unemployed black men were as likely to marry as were their unemployed white counterparts. Greater than 80 percent of black families in New York in 1905 were headed by the father. In 1925, only 3 percent of black families were headed by a woman under twenty. As of 1950, the percentage of black families that consisted of husband-wife households was 78 percent; as late as 1967, the ratio hovered in the range of 72 to 75 percent.All of this changed in the post-1960s period. Between 1950 and 1963, the illegitimacy rate rose from 17 percent to 23 percent of all black births. As early as 1965, facts such as these prompted Daniel Patrick Moynihan to claim in his famous report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” that disintegration of the family was the single greatest problem confronting black Americans. But concerned people such as Moynihan had seen nothing yet.⁷

By the late 1960s and 1970s, the welfare system was in place, and its effects were fully felt. In many cases, families never formed, as AFDC payments allowed men to reject marriage and full-time employment. In New York City in 1970, 600,000 children belonged to welfare families, of whom 445,000 had no fathers in their lives. By 1980, 48 percent of black babies were born to single mothers, compared to 17 percent in 1950. In that same year, 82 percent of all children born to black girls aged 15-19 were illegitimate. By 1998, the illegitimacy rate for black children stood at a staggering 70 percent.⁸  

The news is equally grim regarding the trends in LFP. In 1954, 85 percent of black males aged sixteen or older were participating in the labor force, i.e., were either working or actively seeking employment. Such a high figure was not unusual, for black males had been participating in the labor force at rates as high or higher than white males back to the turn of the 20^th century. But from 1966-1976, the black reduction in LFP was 271 percent higher than for whites, with the overwhelming preponderance of the decline centering on young males aged 16-24. However, older black men (those born before 1950) showed a significant rise in employment during the same period. This means that young black men were showing vastly less interest in working than had their fathers, grandfathers and even older brothers.  Something had changed for those who reached their late teens in the late 1960s and 1970s.⁹

Regarding crime, the situation also deteriorated. In the decade of the 1950s, the rate of homicide victimization dropped 22 percent for black males despite the fact that blacks were increasingly moving into large cities where crime tended to be the highest. Further, the elderly who have lived for decades in black urban neighborhoods repeatedly report that life in those neighborhoods was not especially dangerous in the years leading up to the late 1960s. This is a claim borne out by police records. Black Americans had no pre-welfare-state history of crime rates comparable to those of the welfare period. Since the late 1960s the rate of violent crime has soared in the once-relatively-safe black urban neighborhoods. Black men today are murdered at twice the rate they were in 1960. Half of all the murder victims in the U.S. in 1995 were black, though blacks compose but one-eighth of the population. An anonymous survey of criminal victims conducted by the Census Bureau shows that 80 percent of black victims of violent crime report that the perpetrators were black. In 1993, Jesse Jackson stated, “There is nothing more painful to me than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery – then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved." Tragically for the black community today, the Reverend Jackson’s feelings are grounded in reality.¹⁰ 

Economically, the news is also bad. After decades of rapid economic progress, culminating in the 1970 figure of a 30 percent poverty level, the black movement toward prosperity significantly slowed. In 1980, 29 percent of black families still lived below the official poverty line; in 1995, the figure was 26 percent. It is significant that economic progress slowed so drastically during the era in which governmental paternalism was at its height.¹¹

The government’s effort to help the black urban poor has resulted in reduced employment, diminished economic progress and soaring rates of illegitimacy and crime. Conservatives have long pointed out one level of causation. If the government financially encourages indolence, illegitimacy and the decline of two-parent households, and if it adopts a more permissive attitude toward disruptive behavior in the schools and criminal behavior in the streets, then it makes a direct assault on the ethics of personal responsibility necessary for individuals to lead a productive life.

One telling indication of the welfare state’s harmful impact is what happens when it is curtailed. In 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, requiring able-bodied welfare recipients to find jobs within two years. The Left was appalled. The Department of Health and Human Services predicted that the child-poverty rate would increase by 11 percent. Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, warned: “If this bill is enacted into law, it will increase child poverty more than any other piece of legislation enacted in decades.” But from the liberals’ perspective, a peculiar thing happened when welfare recipients got off the dole and started to work: their income rose. The percentage of Americans living below the poverty line dropped significantly, from 13.8 percent in 1995 to 11.8 percent in 1999.¹²  But the horrors of the welfare state cannot be measured exclusively in terms of diminished living standards, because the governmental paternalism on which welfare is based attacks the requirements of man’s life at a deeper level.

The underlying philosophy of paternalism – which originates in the thought of Kant and Hegel – is profoundly mistaken. Its essence is the claim that an individual’s thinking and character are conditioned by his society; that he is immersed in its fundamental concepts from infancy, absorbing them from his family, the educational system, religious organizations, the legal system, etc. An individual is cognitively, morally and behaviorally molded by society, a helpless plaything of the group. Marx added to this theory of social determinism, claiming that the poor are victims of capitalist oppression, unable to rise by means of individual thought and effort. Since the poor are powerless victims of capitalist exploitation, a benign government must redress the injustice by redistributing income. Further, Marx and his contemporary heirs are philosophical materialists, who hold that man is exclusively physical and that manual labor is the source of all production. As materialists, they believe that man is conditioned specifically by his economic class and that simply giving people the money necessary to buy material goods is sufficient to improve their existence. Poor individuals then become wards of the state, and are not expected to assume personal responsibility for their lives.

But a fundamental fact of man’s nature and of the world in which he lives is that he must create the values upon which his survival depends. Human beings must work productively to support their existence, and that of any children they choose to bring into the world. Any ostensibly benign scheme of paternalism, which offers to support men with no productive effort on their part, gives to human beings a false message. It severs the tie between productivity and values, between an individual’s creative work and his capacity to consume. It tells man that he can subsist without the creating values. The welfare state is the secularized equivalent of religion’s Garden of Eden, substituting a bountiful Society for God as the source of man’s support. The theory is as false as the religious fantasy it is based on; it is false in reality, it is metaphysically false, whatever  Marxist intellectuals and politicians believe.

The welfare state conducts a war on value creation – and its recipients remain mired in poverty, because having been seduced onto the dole they have struck a Faustian bargain with the devil. Once having accepted AFDC with its perverse incentives, the average family’s stay on it is thirteen years.¹³   Though it came as a shock to the Left that government handouts diminished men’s living standards and productive work raised them, both phenomena were predictable to thinkers who understood that man cannot prosper or even survive in the absence of value achievement. The welfare state, by encouraging parasitism and undercutting the work ethic, necessarily diminishes the production, achievement and living standards of its recipients. 

But the welfare state’s fundamental horror is its assault on the mind. Man’s rational faculty is the fundamental means by which he creates values and achieves prosperity on earth. The welfare state, by severing the connection between values and productive work, renders the mind unnecessary as a tool of survival. Its development and use is no longer required, because it has been replaced by a paternalistic state. It is no accident that research shows “lessened cognitive development” in the illegitimate children of welfare mothers. Researchers find that young children who have averaged at least two months per year since birth on AFDC have IQs 20 per cent below those whose families have received no welfare, even when such factors as race, income and neighborhood are controlled for. The state has undercut the mother’s need for education and the father is absent; the result is that serious family discussion, intellectual stimulation and incentives for cognitive development are vastly reduced. A tragic indication of the harmful cognitive impact of welfare is that current drives for welfare reform find it necessary to require welfare recipients to ensure their school-age children attend school regularly as a prerequisite of continuing benefits.¹⁴

Personal responsibility and value achievement are intellectual virtues; they require planning, thought and education. Under paternalism, there is a diminished need for these virtues; consequently, there is diminished education, cognitive development, planning and serious thinking. This is the deeper reason that black urban welfare neighborhoods suffer from a culture that is largely physicalistic and hedonistic, emphasizing sports, sex, drugs and unremitting violence. Young men often feel the need to “nine” anyone who dares to “diss” them, i.e., kill with a nine-millimeter automatic anyone who disrespects them. Education and intellectual development are contemptuously viewed as unmanly and, among many young black males from welfare families, “a white man’s gig.” A heartbreaking but not uncommon example was the case of Cedric Jennings, an outstanding young student in Washington, D.C., who strove for an Ivy League education but was threatened by local toughs who hated his intellectuality. In a story referred to by the Wall Street Journal as “the Crab Bucket Syndrome” (for the phenomenon of crabs in a bucket dragging down one that seeks to climb out), the thugs harassed Jennings – and other top students – because they believed his brilliant mind was a manifestation of “trying to be white.” Fortunately, in Cedric’s case, his relentless work ethic won him a scholarship to an MIT summer program and eventually acceptance into Brown University, where he majored in math.¹⁵ Cedric escaped the violence. Others were neither so independent – nor so lucky.

A grim fact is that though black males aged 14-24 constitute but one percent of the population they make up 17 percent of the homicide victims and 30 percent of the homicide offenders.¹⁶ The devaluation of the mind, of man’s tool of survival, is the reason that so many young males from welfare families do not survive. When the mind is viewed as unnecessary for survival, it is scornfully rejected. The rise of brutality and criminal violence is then a certainty. Researchers June O’Neill and Anne Hill found that growing up in a single-parent family in a neighborhood with numerous such families on welfare triples a young man’s probability of committing criminal actions.¹⁷ The message implicit in paternalism is that human beings do not require the mind as a means of survival. Because many individuals get the government’s message and repudiate their rational faculties, the tragic results follow. This war on the mind is the most evil of all the welfare state’s legacies. 

Individuals must always take responsibility for their own lives, and those who have been seduced onto the dole by Washington’s welfare pimps are no exception. They have made a horrendous, self-destructive choice. For the sake of their own lives and that of their children, they must change it. Nevertheless, this in no way exonerates the federal and state governments that have made large elements of personal irresponsibility financially more rewarding in the short term than marriage, two-parent families and full-time employment. After more than thirty years of the welfare debacle, there can be no doubt: the government is the first cause and prime mover in the development and perpetuation of a sizable minority of Americans whose lives have been shattered by welfare, illegitimacy, disintegration of two-parent families and crime.

Any type of welfare state is unjust to the productive individuals who are forced to finance it. Perhaps equally bad is the horrific harm it perpetrates on the poor. It is an open question whether its impact is most detrimental on the payer or payee. On the one hand, the men forced to finance it are not merely the most productive individuals in society who are now prevented from expanding their productive operations and/or enjoying the fruits of their labor. More important, they bear no necessary culpability in their own victimization, for they perhaps did not vote for welfare policies.  On the other hand is the repudiation of value achievement and the mind surreptitiously embodied in the welfare state’s siren call to the poor. Whichever way this question is ultimately decided, welfare’s universal, undiluted harm cannot be denied.

For these reasons the welfare state cannot be reformed. Its first premise, that it is just to force the productive to support the nonproductive, is false. Its second premise, that welfare payments are in the interest of the poor, is worse than false; it leads to a virtual all-out war on the part of the government against poor individuals. The welfare system needs to be entirely eliminated. If it could be blasted from the face of the earth, a sincere humanitarianism would compel us to do so. Those who are able, must find jobs. Those who are unable, must seek support from friends, family, neighbors and/or private voluntary charity. The pro-capitalist literature is filled with examples of private charity organizations who, though often themselves permeated with altruist premises, help the poor more effectively than do the government welfare agencies.¹⁸

The deeper philosophical principles involved explain why the conservatives are content merely to reform welfare. Many hold religious premises, including an altruistic ethics that blinds them to the true nature of selfishness and the enormously positive impact of a life devoted to rational values. When a man construes the good – a la Jesus – in terms of mawkish service to the needy, he is blinded to the achievements possible to each man, and is unable to crusade on their behalf. He clings to the belief, despite all evidence to the contrary, that men can be helped by self-sacrificial service. Worse, given the religionists’ faith-based epistemology, they can never fully embrace the mind or the conditions necessary for it to flourish. They are unable to see the welfare state as an assault on man’s survival instrument and are left wondering regarding the deeper reasons of welfare’s devastating impact. Their philosophy therefore blinds them to the fundamental reason that welfare needs to be eradicated. 

Based on Christian premises, many conservatives think of man as a sinful being, motivated by greed or other “low urges.” Because of this, they often lapse into Marxist style arguments, thinking welfare recipients are motivated solely by economic incentives and overlooking the key role of philosophy. Welfare causes such widespread destruction because economic incentives are used to support the philosophical view that man is helpless and utterly dependent on society for sustenance. Welfare places economic incentives in service of collectivist ideology. It lures unwitting poor individuals to sell their minds and souls to the state for 30 pieces of silver – and in that combination lies the secret of its devastating impact.

In fact, poverty is not like an incurable disease. It is a problem that is resolved by full-time employment. But the poor individual must be willing to examine and change the destructive values that underlie and give rise to his poverty. In some terms, he must understand both the nature of selfishness and the role of the mind, if he is to achieve success and happiness. The welfare state militates against such understanding and supports his most irrational premises. This is why it must be eliminated. 

1.      Charles Murray, Losing Ground (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 48-49.

2.      Ibid., pp. 156-59.

3.      Ibid.,  pp. 54-55.

4.      Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), pp. 233-34; Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 211, 214.

5.      Losing Ground, op. cit., pp. 170-71; Kay S. Hymowitz, “Who Killed School Discipline,” City Journal, Spring 2000, pp. 34-43.  

6.      Clarence Carson, The War on the Poor (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1969).

7.      Losing Ground, op. cit., p. 129; America in Black and White, op. cit., pp. 254-55; Ethnic America, op. cit., p. 213.