By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I go out of my way to read Thomas Sowell’s columns. He has the unique ability to be both informative and entertaining. A recent column, found in the online edition of National Review, entitled “Conservatives Shouldn’t Treat the Welfare State as Inevitable,” was no exception. Sowell points out the dangers of accepting the welfare state as part of our societal life, of trying to come up with a “better approach” to distributing welfare payments, a way of “managing the costs.”
He begins by pointing out the debilitating effects of the welfare state upon both the taxpayers who finance it and the “clients” who rely upon it. He contends it makes no sense for conservatives to seek a more “efficient” way of providing its support payments. Cost isn’t the issue, as much as welfare’s effect, “which amounts to relieving people from personal responsibility.”
Sowell does not disagree that “there are some people unable to provide for their own survival — infants and the severely disabled, among others. But providing for such people is wholly different from a blanket guarantee to everybody that they need not lift a finger to feed, clothe, or shelter themselves.”
Doing that, he continues, has resulted, in both England and the United States, in a “vast expansion in the amount of crime, violence, drug addiction, fatherless children, and other signs of social degeneration.”
Sowell refuses to accept the argument that it is a “coincidence” that this social decay took place contemporaneously with the establishment of the welfare state. “There have been too many coincidences in too many very different times and places,” he writes, “where people were relieved from the challenge of survival by windfall gains of one sort or another.” He offers as examples Spain and Saudi Arabia.
Spain’s 16th and 17th centuries “golden age” permitted Spain to live off the gold and silver from its colonies in the Western hemisphere “without having to develop the skills, the sciences, or the work ethic of other countries in Western Europe.” As a result, Spain “became, and remained, one of the poorest countries in Western Europe,” exhibiting “disdainful attitudes toward productive work” that held back its economic development far into the 20th century.
Saudi Arabia’s oil resources have created a similar situation, making it a country “with both a fabulously wealthy ruling elite and a heavily subsidized general population in which many have become disdainful of work. The net result has been a workforce in which foreigners literally outnumber Saudis.”
Sowell is on the mark. All one need do to confirm his observations is look at the young men and unmarried mothers idling away their days in urban projects or on ramshackle porches in Appalachia. There is no question that welfare can destroy initiative and human dignity, taking away an individual’s ability to be a self-sufficient member of society. Sowell is correct to point that out.
But after this point is conceded, what comes next? We are left with the question of how to get out of the mess he describes. I don’t criticize Sowell for not answering that question; I don’t know of anyone who has the answer. It could be the central problem of our time.
How do we deal with massive numbers of young men and women, of all races, ravaged by drugs, barely literate and unemployable? What do we do with the millions of unmarried young women? The latest figures indicate about 80 percent of first children born to black women were outside of marriage; 53 percent of Hispanic; 34 percent of whites. If we don’t want these people to starve and freeze to death, we have to continue to provide them with the welfare state’s safety net.
And what about the massive flow of illegal immigrants? We are told that they “take the jobs that no one else wants.” That may be true. It can be debated. But they have children while they are here. Those children and their mothers are going to need the full panoply of welfare services, everything from subsidized housing to food stamps to Medicaid. The Democratic Party is eager to provide those services. The Republican opposition to the Democrats’ “generosity” is half-hearted; they keep the benefits flowing, perhaps with a work requirement or two. No one wants to see unmarried women and their children freezing and starving on our streets.
What brought us to this sad state affairs? Some would say Democratic politicians looking for votes. Others would point to a misguided sense of compassion that prevented our government from saying no to the expansion of welfare back when the problem was more manageable. There is logic in this last contention: Small numbers of people can be taken care of by private charities, not entire neighborhoods.
But there is something else to consider: There are those who insist that what we are witnessing is the unfolding of an ingenious scheme concocted by two American socialists back in the middle years of the 20th century: Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy was formulated in a May 1966 article in the liberal magazine The Nation titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.”
Their goal was to bring about the collapse of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy and the welfare system with a flood of impossible demands. Community organizers in groups such as ACORN became the foot soldiers in the plot. They made the poor, especially minority poor, aware of their “right” to government assistance in the form of welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid.
Cloward and Piven envisioned this massive wave of applicants for government services creating a crisis that would throw the country into turmoil. Their hope was that the turmoil would provide the setting for socialists to step forward with the offer of guaranteed jobs in government owned or controlled businesses, a guaranteed annual income.
Think about what this means. For Cloward and Piven and their followers, the more poor, the more immigrants, the more illegitimate children, the more unemployable societal dropouts, the better. People like this are needed to create the crisis in capitalism they were seeking. The rich and the middle class, in Cloward and Piven’s eyes, were content to live with a relatively small number of welfare recipients living in ghettoized communities. Out of sight, out of mind.
But hordes of the angry poor demanding a living wage, food, medical care, and housing is another matter. Cloward and Piven believed that only a socialist wealth redistribution program could deal with turmoil of that magnitude.
Most Americans have never heard of Cloward and Piven, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Bernie Sanders have. All the young counterculture radicals knew them well. That is why cities teeming with illegal immigrants, unemployed young men and young women giving birth to out-of-wedlock children do not trouble them as much as it does most Americans.
They see the situation as an opportunity. It is what they mean when they talk about never letting a crisis go to waste.
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