Slaying the Leviathan: Going Beyond the Great Society

The collapse of the welfare state in America and throughout the world conclusively illustrates the failure of government charity. Increasingly we have come to realize, it is not the value of our goods, but the good in our values. Decades of Great Society transfer payments have not empowered our poor, they have condemned them to lives of privation. Thirty years and billions of dollars after we declared "war" on poverty we must acknowledge defeat. The economic remedies aimed at helping the poor have proven ineffectual against the poverty, destitution, and despair they sought to alleviate. Until we recognize the power of free institutions, real progress towards effective compassion will continue to elude us.

Wealth is not necessary and sufficient for morality any more than poverty is prerequisite for crime, violence, and illegitimacy. Lord Acton's observation that the remedy for poverty lies with the moral resources of the poor, not the financial reserves of the wealthy, speaks directly to the issue at stake. Poverty is an economic condition with moral ramifications. The poor have ethical responsibilities to themselves, their families, and their communities to actively work toward changing their circumstances. The decline of this ethic, and the abdication of personal responsibility by the affluent, has created a culture of apathy and complaint that immobilizes society, frustrating attempted solutions. The welfare bureaucracy contributes to such feelings by reducing the indigent to consumers of federally administered programs.

Our leviathan called welfare, with its various entitlements, subsidies, and benefits, is not the panacea its originators had hoped. Instead, it has become the source and symbol of government waste and ineptitude. According to noted social scientist, Charles Murray, if every one of America's 7.5 million families living below the poverty line were lifted above it, through supplemental incomes, poverty would continue and society's many ills would remain.¹ They would perdure because food stamps, welfare checks and earned income tax credits all fail to address the underlying causes of poverty. Economist H. Erich Heinemann observes how increasing levels of government transfer payments have not fostered equity: "From 1977 to 1992, government transfer payments (which mostly take income from people who work to give to those who do not) totaled $7.3 trillion... yet the gap between rich and poor became wider..."² Heinemann's testimony demonstrates the inverse relationship between government spending and poverty. The more we spend the greater and more entrenched the problem becomes. Any effective solution must entail moral standards not simply material goods.

Where did welfare go wrong? The decline of the nuclear family, the marginalization of human relationships, the decay of the Protestant work ethic, and the ebbing of religious practice and moral values are all co-contributors to the current crisis. It is no accident that the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a group dedicated to welfare reform through cost- effective community based solutions, included the maintenance of family and faith in God among its recently released "Seven Rules of Effective Compassion."³ The ultimate solution is neither an anemic welfare state nor burgeoning federal expenditures. The ideal is based on radical personal responses to the poverty in our homes, our streets, our neighborhoods, and in our communities. The war on poverty cannot be a proxy war, one in which we write checks so others can wage the fight. It demands commitment and sincerity from both sides. Under the present system the poor view their benefactors as condescending; the affluent see the poor as ingrates. Only when mutual cooperation replaces contempt will real reform be possible.

Early efforts in colonial America to assist the needy presumed a certain relationship between giver and recipient. The benefactor was obliged, by virtue of his fortune, to respond liberally and act generously. The beneficiary was to better himself according to strict guidelines. Should the recipient prove unworthy of charity by being slothful, lewd or disingenuous, it was immediately revoked.⁴ Clearly, the poor in early America needed more than furlough papers or a pink slip to get help. Demands were made on them before assistance was granted. Religion was largely responsible for this understanding becoming a social convention. As Marvin Olasky states in his socio-historical account of American compassion, the economy for giving in colonial times was deeply rooted in religious belief.⁵ Indeed, the evolution of welfare cannot be wholly separated from the theological understandings present at various stages of American history. The God of the early colonies was "hard headed and warm hearted," an attitude reflected in America's initial welfare paradigm.⁶

To a generation born during the Great Society, the notion of welfare recipients having reciprocal obligations is almost inconceivable. What changed to account for the difference? For one, the American family. In the 1800's, families were exponentially larger. Then, as now, they constituted the basic economic unit of society. Unlike today, they were the primary agent of inculturation and socialization. A child growing up in a three generation household benefited from a built-in safety net. His family was the source of his practical training, religious upbringing, and economic livelihood.⁷

In sharp contrast, the nuclear family in contemporary America is in dizzying decline. It has been replaced as the primary means of socialization by television and school respectively. A child growing up in inner city slums, supported by welfare, with no economic prospects, is not going to turn his life around at school or through the popular media because neither teaches selfless love or moral virtue.⁸ Today's value-neutral society rejects public expressions of faith, especially in our schools, for fear of offending the smallest of minorities. With the continued fragmentation of families, the chance for moral instruction at home has become increasingly remote.

Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft writes, "The family is the only place most people learn life's single most important lesson, selfless love."⁹ When over half of American marriages end in divorce and three quarters of extant unions are unhappy, the traditional family is an endangered institution.¹⁰ If Kreeft is right, vast numbers of America's children are not learning life's most important lessons. Reflecting on the black community, Dr. Henry Louis Gates acknowledges that a three generation household, where the grandmother is thirty-two and the mother sixteen, is not a beacon of hope.¹¹ To resign ourselves to a world of single parent families is to deny an entire generation the formation they need to lead successful and fulfilling lives. To expect schools to fill the void by teaching watered down, politically correct ethics is absurd. American students recently ranked fourteenth in international academic testing. What makes us think they will take ethics any more seriously than they do arithmetic? Without parental reinforcement, "values education" is futile.

The family debate is especially relevant amongst the underclass, where single parent households are norm. In 1984 there were 3.6 million poor families with single female heads, a disturbing trend that continues to the present. Single parent homes are no longer a social anomaly owed to war, death or divorce.¹² Illegitimacy is increasingly the primary cause. Consequently, women are forced to become bread winners or welfare mothers. Often, the task of nurturing and educating children is left to the schools or ignored all together. Even more disturbing is the growing phenomena of delinquent fathers. Charles Murray, suggests that the welfare system encourages such behavior. In 1960, a man with a child out of wedlock was better off marrying and working, because public assistance was not as lucrative as most entry level jobs. Not so today. A father who gets married and works a forty hour week at a minimum wage makes less than the father who lives with, or abandons his partner and receives public assistance.¹³ The poor are destitute, not dumb. If given a choice they will always choose welfare.

By making work unprofitable we have made welfare inevitable. Ours is a society that says to women, "We will underwrite your well-being only if you have children you can't afford." We reward the lazy and punish the industrious unwittingly. Of the $150 billion spent annually on welfare, a mere fraction gets to the streets.¹⁴ The rest is lost in the system, spent on the massive regulatory agencies who oversee and implement the bureaucracy. In the face of such mismanaged good intentions what should be the Christian response? Lord Acton's statement that, "These (moral resources) which are lulled and deadened by money-gifts, can be raised and strengthened only by personal influence, sympathy, charity," provides an answer. Meeting the material needs of the poor is just the first step towards rehabilitation and recovery.

In remarks to the United Nations General Assembly last October, Pope John Paul II articulates a definite model of Christian compassion. Recognizing that broken families and materialism are the breeding grounds for paucity and despair, the Holy Father's vision is progressive and pragmatic: "The poor have needs which are not only material or economic but also involve liberating their potential to work out their own destiny and provide for the well-being of their families and communities."¹⁵ The current welfare solution is painfully deficient in attending to the spiritual, social and educational needs of the indigent. E. Fuller Torrey's treatment of homelessness confirms this understanding, contradicting the "money cures all" myth. According to Torrey there are three classes of homeless: those who suffer from mental illness, schizophrenia or psychoses; those with dependencies, low I.O.'s, criminal records or personality disorders (presumably the paupers of earlier generations); and those displaced because of economics or misfortune.¹⁶ Throwing money at the homeless will not address the causes of homelessness anymore than it will make delinquent fathers return to their families or teach a welfare child how to read. In a society where materialism is a religion we should not be surprised by the tenacity of those who cling to the big government school of benevolence. Advancing alternative models of effective compassion will be difficult.

Replacing welfare with viable options is a daunting, but not impossible task. New alternatives must foster dignity by placing a premium on personal responsibility. In his second letter to the Thessalonians St. Paul states: "If a man will not work, he shall not eat."¹⁷ The point is not to rebuke the lazy by denying them food; rather, the essential dignity inherent in human labor must be encouraged. Just as men need food to sustain their bodies, work gives sustenance to their human vocations. To labor is to sanctify one's existence by positively interacting with and creatively contributing to society. St. Paul's view is brought forward and fulfilled in the 1991 papal encyclical Centesimus Annus. Stressing the bonds of family, community and the, "widespread individualistic mentality," Pope John Paul expounds a manifold and obligatory morality that informs the relationship between the poor and the society.¹⁸ He addresses specifically the marginalization of human relationships by state-sponsored solutions, saying: "At times it seems as though he (the indigent) exists only as a producer and consumer of goods, or as an object of state administration."¹⁹ By reducing the fight against poverty to a system of credits and debits, we have impersonalized the problem. Community initiatives and personal activism must again become the primary focus if we are to go beyond the Great Society.

Two generation ago, Franklin Roosevelt urged our nation forward when the worst economic depression in human history brought us to our knees: "Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the jot of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten..."²⁰ Roosevelt's wisdom must not be lost. Our current welfare crisis defies economic prescription. Lord Acton's comment that, "Money gifts save the poor man who gets them, but give longer life to pauperism in the country," is eerily prophetic of America's failed welfare bureaucracy. Compassion cannot be measured by the amount we spend on the poor. Dignity cannot be bought. Our response must emphasize not just values over economics but the primacy of those values. Effective compassion will only be achieved through personal involvement. We must act not as citizens out of duty, but as human beings out of love -- for ours is a crisis of moral calamity, not of material goods.