There are times when certain liberal, and dare I say, socialist policies, are for the greater good. Take oh, I dunno, THE DEPRESSION. Government construction projects and tons of government programs, including social security, were all instituted during the depression. Without them, we arguably would never have recovered well enough to have been able to handle WWII.
Actually without them we would have recovered from the depression sooner than we did. Government intervention in the economy prolongs depressions, it doesn't shorten them. By pulling productive capital out of the private market and adding to the aggregate spending stream of the economy the government puts off the necessary economic corrections that need to take place. The whole keynseyian idea that recessions are caused by a fall in consumer spening is wrong, and doesn't fit the evidence. If it were that way retail markets would be the first and fastest to fall, when instead they are last and the least to fall. Depressions hit capital goods markets first and hardest, indicating a severe economic distortion which caused investors to favor long term production and future goods when people weren't in fact spending that way. The source of this faulty signal is monetary mismanagement by the Federal Reserve. By making bank credit and raw cash more available they send an erroneous signal to investors to invest in capital goods and production rather than consumer goods. When this error is exposed you end up with a depression, tons of businesses take losses and prices both of materials and labor in capital goods markets fall like a rock. The government can't solve this problem, it can only make it worse by increasing taxes, further inflation and subsidizing failing businesses, all of which delay the necessary liquidations and market corrections.
But you of course say that ANY liberal policies are evil and anyone who disagrees with you is a blind leftwing nutcase and too stupid to "see the light" of you wonderful vision of this superworld where everyone is capable of pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and there is no such thing as a position of poverty that is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to get out of without government intervention. A position of poverty that people are born into every day. In greater and greater numbers too with all the lost jobs.
To be blunt, yes. Anyone who still thinks leftist, socialist economic policies have any chance of success is severely lacking in brains. I don't doubt there are some people who are in dire poverty, who find it almost impossible to get out. That's why I donate to charity, which is my choice. No one has any business forcing me to give money to someone else via taxation and wealth transfer. As for the actual condition of poverty, you'll find with a very little study that when it's not due to the person's own poor choices and their failure to learn from them, it's almost always the government that perpetuates poverty, usually by engaging in extremely stupid economic policies that don't ever allow the cost of living to fall.
For example inflation, which is essentially wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to the rich. By making more credit and cash available to certain select businesses and investors the government is giving them extra money to spend that has today's buying power. By the time it filters through the system and normal people like me see it, it's already devalued as are my savings. Thus people demand more of it in return for the same products and services. That is the familiar price rise which most people erroneously think is inflation. Inflation is the actual expansion of the money and credit supplies, the price rise is just an after effect.
The end result of such policies is a constant bidding of the prices of land higher, but by the time the the same effect bids up the prices of labor the currency is already devalued so buying all the bare necessities of life, like a place to live, takes an even higher percentage of a person's income.
Welfare is overboard, I agree with that. Foodstamps are arguably not necessary either. But saying a working mother below the povertyline isn't entitled to some meager help with childcare will just force her to stay below the povertyline her whole life. It outright prevents anyone born into that kind of poverty to EVER advance without resorting to criminal behavior. Oh sure, but don't believe me. CLose your eyes to what happens every friggin day in the inner cities.
That
is welfare. Why did she have the kid without being able to afford it? You're honestly telling me she couldn't balance the cost of raising a child compared to that of a rubber, a birth control pill, a morning after pill, or an abortion? She may in fact live in poverty her whole life if she doesn't begin to learn to make smarter choices. The surest way to ensure she never learns to make smarter choices is to constantly support her after she makes them. Exactly what is stopping her from
asking someone for help, a charity a church? Asking someone to
voluntarily help her? Usually such help will come with qualifications, such as we'll help you with the kid but you need to start showing us you can behave responsibly. Go to school, go to church, try to better yourself, not just lean on someone else for your entire life.
How's this for an idea. How about no government at all. How about complete Anarchy. That way everybody can REALLY fend for themselves and truly try to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Getting shot at by a bunch of hoodlums. Quit whining! Go out a grab a fucking gun and shoot back you little crybaby! Who needs a police force, people should learn to protect themselves! It worked for the Mongol hoard didn't it? Public schools? Screw you, people should learn to read right and do math on their own! It isn't the government's job to teach people.
The ideal world
would be anarcho capitalist, where all exchanges are voluntary and no one used force or fraud against another. However this is not an ideal world and you'll find most people accept the need for some amount of government.
Let me give you an analogy since you still seem to be in liberal economic lala land. Let's say there's a coat factory, and this is their rule: you can buy whatever you want, but you have to buy at least this one store coat that they sell. It's the only coat factory in town, so everyone has to shop there and pay for the initial store coat before they go and try to find what they want. Since they have a captive customer base there's no incentive to keep the cost of that one "must buy" coat down, so its cost skyrockets, it goes down in quality and everyone still has to buy at least that one coat. The end result? Only the rich can afford to go in and buy the store coat and also get the one they actually want. The middle class and the poor are screwed, and deal with the crappy store coat because they don't have any extra money to spend on another. Eventually the cost of that coat gets so high, without a concurrent rise in its quality, that the poor can't afford it anymore, so the factory starts demanding the rich and the middle class 'help' the poor pay for their one "must buy" coat. The rich say **** it, decide it's not worth the cost and go to the next town over and shop there without such restrictions. So the cost ends up being born by the middle class alone, and it keeps growing and growing and growing and growing because no one in the factory has an incentive to change things.
Substitute the government for the coat factory, and education, welfare or whatever product or service the government provides for the coat, and you'll start to get a clue why welfare of any kind is doomed to fail. NO ONE IS QUESTIONING YOUR
MOTIVATION FOR WANTING TO HELP THE POOR AND THE DISADVANTAGED. IT'S YOUR FUCKING METHODS THAT ARE WAY OFF AND THAT ARE GOING TO
END UP FUCKING EVERYONE OVER. Everyone but the rich, who can afford to divorce themselves from the system. Get it?
Now what you say is put a qualification on it, make her work for the benefits. But there's no way to keep that qualification on there. She and people like her will merely band together and vote to have it removed. Have you never noticed that no government program's budget ever shrinks, that no problem they set out to solve actually lessens but increases in urgency? Let me ask you, supposed we enact the perfect government program, and not only do we help support these women with the qualification that they work for it, but we also manage to teach people like her to make more responsible decisions and in ten years all of the sudden the problem is solved to a point where private charity more than covers the remaining needy. Wonderful result, right? Now what do all those government social workers do for a job, now that their pet problem has been solved and they're no longer needed? They're out of a job, which isn't so good as far as they're concerned.
What you need to understand is that the ability of people to simply vote the qualifications you prescribe away and the perverse incentive structure that government imposes on a problem ensures that the problem won't go away and such reasonable restrictions will not stay in place. The recipients of welfare will vote themselves more. The workers within the program will see wonderful new problems they need to help with so their budgets and their job security can be increased. By enacting a government program you are
by nature making it in the best interests of everyone involved in it, both the administrators and the recipients, to grow the program and remove restrictions. That's what happens when you allow the consumer of a good or service (recipients of welfare) to decide it's availability and cost, and when you allow the producer of that good or service (the government) to bill someone else (the taxpayer) for the eventual real cost.
If you're so desperate to help such people why don't you do what I do and donate to a charity that you believe will best help them, such as United Negro College Fund? I think the best way to help inner city kids, mostly blacks, is to help them get an education, so I give what and when I can. Here's the best part about giving to charity! Not only do market conditions force the charity to be a lot more efficient in how is uses the money, but if you find they're doing a poor job of it you can decide
not to give to them and find another one that will do better. You can even start your own charity to do a better job of it. That's
not an option when dealing with charity by government fiat, otherwise known as welfare. Remember the Chicago fire back a century or so ago? Private charities basically rebuilt the whole fucking city, the government merely dispatched troops to keep order. You're essentially saying that private charity, a force that can rebuild entire cities in less than a decade, is less desirable than the government, a force that can barely pave its own roads adequately and has never ever solved a singal social problem it's set it's eyes on.