Restoring Charity: Introduction

In the midst of the collapse of socialism, we all felt the exhilaration of being part of history on fast forward. One day a seemingly impenetrable power elite controlled a statist, tyrannical, and unworkable system; the next, the old order was gone and the new struggled to recreate institutions compatible with human rights, human liberty, and economic good sense. We watched in amazement as an impossible dream came true for millions.

If nothing else, the experience taught us that very little is permanent in politics and that unjust socialist systems of governance are more fragile than they at first appear. When unjust systems of rule are held to standards of morality and are judged to be wrong, they cannot long survive.

Today the American welfare state is in a situation similar to that of socialism in the mid-1980s. It is a bureaucratic, unproductive, and even destructive system of wealth redistribution that does little or nothing to promote the ideals that motivated its founding. For that reason, everyone, to one extent or another, is aware that the system is not working and has not worked for some time.

To understand fully the welfare crisis we are now in, and to undertake effective reforms, we need to look at recent history to see how the social safety net was established. Our present social safety net began in earnest with the New Deal programs of Roosevelt. New Deal programs were not designed simply to relieve poverty or redistribute income and wealth. There also was an attempt to relieve people of the burdens of old age, infirmity, and unemployment. This form of economic liberalism slowly became engrained in the American social and political climate through successive administrations.

It was on society’s cautious embrace of liberalism that John F. Kennedy built his welfare message. It took strains from both conservatism and liberalism: “Give a hand, not a handout.” Kennedy’s 1962 welfare proposal was not radical, but it represented a shift in the ultimate goals of welfare. The focus was now to design policy that aimed at helping people escape the dole. It brought the federal government into a role that it did not have in the past. It was, as Charles Murray states in Losing Ground, “not mounting a Works Progress Administration as an emergency measure to relieve unemployment, but instead taking a continuing responsibility for helping Americans help themselves.”

The Kennedy Administration poverty fighters believed the new emphasis would reduce the welfare rolls by making recipients independent. With general prosperity and no war to divert energies, this seemed like a moral and practical goal. The assumption was that those on welfare would gladly leave the rolls if a job were available. The new policy would train those who had been chronically unemployed and equip their children with the skills necessary to get their first job, the first rung on the economic ladder. As Murray points out, these new expectations, more than the actual programs, were Kennedy’s legacy to Johnson. The initial anti-poverty bill appeared in August 1964 as an attempt to put the Kennedy rhetoric into practice.

Although it was not widely recognized at the time, the year 1964 marked a fundamental shift in social policy: The economic system was targeted as the cause of poverty. In part, this thesis could take hold because of the rise of Keynesian economists. The Keynesians dismissed the idea of natural business cycles marked by expansions and contractions in the rate of economic growth. Through policy, the economy could be controlled to prevent severe recessions.

Odd as it may seem today, until the early 1960s the American people did not consider poverty to be a major social problem and it was not a significant part of political dialogue. Much of the attention that was given to poverty in the popular press at this juncture was largely due to the book The Other America by socialist writer Michael Harrington. Harrington’s thesis pointed to the structural nature of poverty in America. In this view, there was a whole class of people left out by the economic system who could not be expected to gain economic growth. The cure for their poverty could only be radical alterations in the American economic system. This became an article of faith for many intellectuals.

This structural view of poverty received a large boost from the failure of the early Johnson Administration programs. During the 1960s, program evaluation became an important component of the War on Poverty. Since the goal of the programs was to remove people from the welfare rolls and therefore be cost-effective, they needed data to prove success or failure. Between 1964–1967, report after report was issued by Congress, chronicling the failure of the social welfare programs.

The general failure of the Great Society programs became evident by early 1968. Joseph Califano, a senior administration aide, called a meeting of reporters to announce that an in-depth government study had shown that only one percent of the over seven-million people on welfare could be trained to be self-sufficient. Welfare was now assumed to be a permanent fixture.

The change was significant but came and went without much notice or public debate. There were no grand ideological battles in the public square. The idea of having a permanent welfare class suited the structural view of poverty, which attributed conditions of deprivation to the system, not to the individual poor. It was here that a critical shift occurred in the American perspective about the poor from the micro to the macro, from the concrete to the abstract.

Throughout the entire development of the welfare state the costs for maintaining and expanding programs grew exponentially. Further monies were diverted from the overall tax revenues, and in some cases, taxes were raised to offset the new and rising costs. Strangely, no one questioned the justice of forcibly taking money from one individual in order to give it to another.

The welfare state and its effects have played a central part in every presidential and off-year election since, and many of the candidates who promised reform have been elected. It is doubtful that Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, or Clinton would have been elected without having promised to change fundamentally certain aspects of a radically deficient welfare state.

The history of the welfare state shows how political changes brought about a shift in the meaning of compassion. Compassion once meant “to suffer with.” It now means “giving to.” As a result of this change, we have come to accept that the demands of compassion can be met through writing a check. But the poor need more than our money; they need our time, our love, our encouragement, our instruction, and our respect.

We must look at welfare anew, with eyes open to human realities. When the socialist system came to a shattering end, very few people had thought about what would replace it. When a similar fate befalls the democratic welfare state, it is my hope that this book will provide some moral and practical guidelines for our future. Like the present reform efforts alive in Washington, this work represents not an end but part of the progress toward the ultimate goal of liberty and security for all.

Robert A. Sirico is president and co-founder of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. Holding a master’s degree in Divinity from the Catholic University of America, Father Sirico is the author of numerous journal and newspaper articles on public policy, economics, and theology. He is also a full-time parish priest, a member of the Mount Pelerin Society, and an international lecturer on economics and religion.