At its core, the welfare state emphasizes group responsibility over individual responsibility. It also emphasizes decisions by elites, and it derides the importance of individual effort. Collective morality has produced the following examples:
A welfare mother who clipped food coupons and saved from her benefits accumulated $3,000 in savings toward sending her child to college. Welfare officials demanded that she return the money and face criminal prosecution.
A Wisconsin man convicted more than thirty times for indecent exposure was turned down for a job as a park attendant. He sued on the grounds that he had never exposed himself in a park, only in libraries and laundromats. Wisconsin employment officials agreed there was “probable cause” that the flasher was the victim of illegal job discrimination.
These examples underscore the failure of the intellectual and moral foundations of the welfare state. Welfare has four intellectual legs:
1. Politicians in Washington can redistribute the wealth of the nation.
2. Important decisions in your life are best left to experts, not family.
3. The work ethic is obsolete and old-fashioned. (Welfare requires you
and your spouse not to work.)
4. Moral relativism – there are no rights and wrongs, just different choices
among alternative lifestyles.
[filed under #3043]