The High Cost of Good Intentions

Welfare harms the people the money comes from and the people the money goes to. Here’s an excerpt from John Cogan’s new book, The High Cost of Good Intentions, that helps make this case:

The book’s central theme is that the creation of entitlements brings forth relentless forces that cause them to inexorably expand. These liberalizing forces are inevitable and inseparable from the entitlements themselves. They originate from a well-meaning human impulse to treat all similarly situated people equally under the law. When first enacted, entitlement laws, for policy or fiscal reasons, confine benefits to a group of individuals who are deemed to be particularly worthy of assistance. As time passes, groups of excluded individuals come forth claiming that they are no less deserving of aid. Pressure is brought by, or on behalf of, excluded groups to relax eligibility rules. The ever-present pressure is magnified during periods of budget surpluses and by public officials’ imperative to be elected and reelected. Eventually the government acquiesces and additional claimants deemed worthy are allowed to join the benefit rolls. That very broadening of eligibility rules inevitably brings another group of claimants closer to the eligibility boundary line, and the pressure to relax qualifying rules begins again. The process of liberalization repeats itself until benefits are extended to a point where the program’s purposes bear only a faint resemblance to its original noble intentions.

Read the rest of chapter 1 of Cogan’s book at World Magazine.