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One can listen to politicians advance their arguments concerning welfare reform and wonder if any progress is being made in changing the public's fundamental attitudes about this issue. The incredible battle against entitlements that continues to be waged sharpened in focus for me during a debate in a college-level communication class I teach. This debate demonstrated once again that only a principled moral argument against government programs will have a chance of succeeding in changing people's minds and restoring our freedom.
The proposition under consideration was: "Welfare for both individual citizens and businesses should be abolished." The students defending this idea ranged in age from 18 to 46 while their opponents were 18 to 22 years old. Each side had a month to prepare their arguments and rebuttals.
As I watched both groups progress in this assignment, I was initially heartened to see the pro-abolition side perusing such works as Charles Murray's In Pursuit and Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion. The examples I heard them discuss sounded effective in portraying the counter-productive consequences of welfare, whether that governmental assistance was supposed to help individuals or businesses.
Meanwhile, the team opposing elimination of welfare focused primarily on reforming the system and demonstrating how nearly everyone in the United States was "on welfare" in one way or another. They planned to appeal to their classmates by pointing out that even they benefited from governmentally sponsored student loans.
During the actual presentations, the national debate that is conducted annually in the halls of Congress was repeated in microcosm.
The pro-abolition side started out in a promising fashion. The students spoke about the trillions of dollars that have gone down the welfare hole; how the number of individuals in poverty and on welfare increased after the start of President Johnson's Great Society; how bureaucrats have a vested interest in maintaining welfare programs; and how business subsidies have increased prices for consumers while helping certain businesses at the expense of both their customers and competitors.
Unfortunately, the main thrust of their argument was simply that welfare does not work and was rife with abuse and corruption. By stopping where they did and emphasizing primarily the pragmatic aspects of the problem, the pro-abolition side essentially ceded the argument to their opponents. Implicitly accepting the basic moral principle of the reform side, they could only fumble along throughout the rest of the debate.
The second group countered the abolition side by acknowledging that some abuses existed but were actually minor in scope; that people needed welfare assistance in order to survive; that their opponents were guided by myths about welfare and those who use it; and that because welfare benefited everyone, it should be continued in basically the same fashion as it is today.
During the rebuttal phase of the debate, the "con" side hammered away on the notion of need. "What will these people do if welfare is abolished?" they asked. "How can you punish innocent children and single mothers who need these benefits?" "Who will help them if the government doesn't?" And on and on and on...
The foundering pro-abolition side was lost in how to respond...and did, in fact, lose the debate.
This object lesson demonstrated the futility of the national debate as normally framed by the political participants. Conservatives echoing my students' arguments face similar stumbling blocks. Advocating "reform" of welfare, Medicare, Social Security, student loans, or favors for businesses will run up against the same brick wall of "need" that for the supporters of welfare in all its myriad permutations justifies everything the government does.
Currently, "reformers" accept the erroneous notion that entitlements are simply out-of-hand but are, at heart, a proper function of government. They believe that the needs of the poor or sick or disadvantaged justify the coercive redistribution of income. Their only true disagreement with their liberal opponents concerns the degree to which this coercion will be carried out.
My students missed the boat by not extending their argument to the moral realm. Only by pointing out that welfare cannot -- even in principle -- be reformed would they have been able to counter the self-righteous tone of their opponents. By its very nature, welfare must lead to waste, abuses, and violations of all our rights. The fact that most of the funds allocated for welfare end up in the hands of welfare administrators is irrelevant to the fundamental issues. Whether or not fraud is rampant or whether or not nearly all Americans benefit from some government program or other has no bearing on the basic issue of whether or not welfare should be abolished. None of the disagreements over how to reform entitlements or how much they should be cut or whether a decrease in a projected level of spending is, in fact, a cut should be offered as any kind of primary concern.
All the frequently acrimonious arguments displayed in the media accept the same principle: that welfare in some form should exist and therefore justifies taking values and resources from one group of people and giving them to another.
Only when politicians from the local city council all the way to the Senate and House begin advocating the complete abolition of government transfer programs in any of their guises will a glimmer of hope for a return to freedom be a realistic possibility. Only when politicians and the citizens who elect them acknowledge that need is not a claim on wealth, that coercion and theft is as immoral for the State as it is for individuals, only then will discussions of appropriate means towards reducing welfare amount to anything more than self-delusion.
Only when we focus first on moral arguments and relegate the pragmatic issues of how to implement proper ethical principles to a secondary (though important) role will we begin taking substantive steps in restoring the moral society we once enjoyed.
That's a hard lesson to learn. Perhaps after seeing the failure of the pragmatic approach, our society will one day find itself in the place of my debate students and rethink what can only be a losing strategy.
