The collapse of the farm bill in the U.S. House of Representatives is a disappointing turn for conservatives seeking to dispel the liberal, yet widely accepted, notion that support for civil rights must translate to welfare programs that harm rather than help the poor.
In his brilliant essay, “What’s Wrong With Benevolence,” David Stove cautioned against ill-conceived good intentions. He warned that “when benevolence is universal, disinterested and external it regularly leads to the forced redistribution of wealth, which in turn leads to decreased economic incentives, lower rates of productivity, and increased poverty.” Our country’s response to racial injustices and poverty was a massive government money gusher for welfare and poverty programs.
Bobby Kennedy went to the South to highlight poor white people with little food. The civil rights movement shone light onto the injustices of segregation. The resulting public response reflected guilt and our complicit involvement in creating victims. Built on a false notion of benevolent policies, the programs themselves failed.
As shown by Charles Murray in Losing Ground, and as I recounted in my book Poor No More, the benevolence bestowed on poor communities helped to foster more poverty, more single-parent families and a plethora of social programs failing to move people from dependency to self-sufficiency. Some $22 trillion spent on poverty programs from the mid-1960s to today have had little effect on American poverty rates.
The question is this: Why have palpably discredited attempts to reduce poverty and right the civil rights injustices of the past continued? Where are liberal leaders bemoaning the wasted efforts to help the poor? And why don’t conservatives gut the programs for squandering resources? Conservatives, for their part, have been unwilling or unable to decouple support for civil rights and alleviating poverty with welfare funding and social programs. For liberals, political support relies on directing public dollars to programs and organizations that bring out the votes for them. We have, then, a pas de deux that allows ineffective programs for poor people to continue and grow.
The liberal response is an obvious and calculated strategy to stay in power. No surprise there. But why would conservatives jettison their fiscal restraint in acquiescence to profligate spending? Their response—a better economy will lift all—has not been born out. And bemoaning the morals and behaviors of the less-fortunate has had the effect of blaming the victim. Public reaction, then, is to dismiss these, propose new and failing programs, with conservatives blinking at the wastefulness with little else to offer.
So where does that leave us in an effort to right the wrongs of the past that continue to linger unabated? The answer, which has been tried and succeeded, is for the government to support only the programs that succeed. And the way to do this is to pay only for outcomes, not for process or intention. In other words, pay only when a program delivers tangible and pre-determined, measurable results. No upfront funds. No partial payments for partial results. Sunsetting those that do not perform, and increasing support to those that do. This would stop the liberal game in its tracks. And conservatives could rally around those programs that prove successful.
Speaker Ryan has spent two years touring the country and identifying anti-poverty programs that are seemingly successful. He and other conservatives would support such an approach. And liberals, who profess caring for the poor, would be forced to accept this or be shamed into their abandonment of the poor.
Arthur Brooks has noted that liberals win debates with conservatives because their arguments are couched in emotion. Conservatives offer logic and facts. Emotion trumps facts. Conservatives have got to demonstrate that they care. By suggesting a performance policy for the government when it comes to reducing poverty, they could support and perhaps offer programs that do just that. This would surely uncouple blind acquiescence to ineffective poverty-reduction efforts to their caring about the issue.
